


The Darkened Road

by beedekka



Category: The Expendables (Movies)
Genre: Action, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Consensual Somnophilia, Edging, Interrogation, M/M, Mind Games, Older Characters, Sleepy Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-14 12:17:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beedekka/pseuds/beedekka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A mission goes bad for the Expendables, putting pressure on the relationship between Barney and Gunnar. This is technically an AU of the second film, I suppose, in that I'm using the same characters for the antagonists, but the team comes into contact with them in different circumstances (and before Billy or Maggie are on the scene).</p><p>Is action and angst your thing? How about beat-up action men? If so, enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The cracks appear along the wall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Following intel from Church, the Expendables are on a mission in their own backyard.
> 
>  
> 
> **This part includes swearing, bloody violence and references to drug use.**

//Barney? You there?//

Lee Christmas’s voice crackled faintly from Barney’s headset, lying on the floor where Hector had yanked it away and tossed it.

//Barney? Come in. Can you hear me?// 

Gunnar’s eyes flicked from Hector to the set. The tiny mic probably wouldn't pick up his voice clearly from here, even if he shouted, and he didn't think Hector would react very well to him trying... 

//Everything okay?//

It was within Barney’s reach, but that was little help since he was lying unconscious in a heap. Gunnar hoped Lee would realise that no answer _was_ an answer to that last question.

He switched his attention back up to Vilain’s lackey with the pistol aimed at his chest and mentally assessed his chances of getting the weapon off him – limited. His own gun was on the ground a metre or so to his right, discarded on Hector’s insistence. Three other thugs surrounded him, weapons covering him on all sides, and he already knew they weren’t afraid to shoot. The prone form on the floor was testament to that. _No we are not okay. Fuckin’ far from it._

He could feel the adrenaline surging in his veins, willing him to fight or flight, but he forced his face into an expression as close to neutral as he could manage. He wouldn’t allow their ambushers the satisfaction of being able to tell that he wasn’t composed. He could see from the corner of his vision that another of them was still aiming a pistol down at Barney’s body. Did that mean he didn’t think his shot had been fatal? Jesus, Gunnar hoped so. 

//Barney, can you hear me?// Lee’s voice came through again. //Can you respond?//

Gunnar looked back at the headset. “If one of us doesn’t answer that…” he began, but Hector cut him off abruptly.

“No. You’re going to talk to _me_.” Without taking his eyes off Gunnar, he stepped over and crushed the mic into the concrete with his boot, grinding its innards into tiny pieces. “Get hold of him!” he ordered, and Gunnar felt his arms being roughly grabbed from behind as two of the others stepped forward, trapping him between them. “And pick that up.” Hector gesticulated in the direction of the body on the floor. Gunnar winced as the other two assailants took hold of Barney, swinging him up roughly like a piece of meat. “Take them to B2,” Hector continued, eyeing Gunnar nastily. “You’re trespassing here, and I think the owner’s going to be very interested to know who sent you and why.”

 

***

 

It should have been a routine operation, scouting out a semi-derelict factory unit they suspected had been acquired by Vilain’s dummy company – an ‘urban renewal’ outfit that masked the use of old industrial sites for the stockpile and onward trading of weapons and their constituent materials. They were already 99% sure it was another one of his lock-ups, but Church wanted to know exactly what was there and whether it looked new or mothballed. They weren’t expecting a heavy security presence, and they certainly weren’t expecting the place to be important enough to have Vilain’s right hand man on site overseeing the show. Within minutes of breaching the perimeter fence and crossing to the buildings their two-man initial reconnaissance party had been ambushed, Barney sent crashing to the floor before either he or Gunnar could fire a shot. 

As he was being frogmarched towards what looked to be some sort of heavy freight elevator Gunnar silently cursed Church’s mission intel – clearly it was a lot less than intelligent; its assertion that these buildings were likely to be a minimally guarded waypoint on Vilain’s network was obviously inaccurate. If they’d been better informed before setting out on the recon they would have come mob-handed, and they would have definitely positioned their mission control location a damn sight closer to the target than it was. Even if Christmas had already realised something was wrong, he and Caesar were valuable minutes away, and on their own for what they’d all thought was a simple in-and-out. The other Expendables were off the clock, scattered to who knew where… If Barney had even thought for a minute that there would be more to the mission, he’d have insisted on a full team complement and mobile back-up right on the doorstep, Gunnar knew. And they would have avoided walking blindly into a situation where they were both now prisoners of a sadistic fuck who carried out the orders of an even more sadistic fuck.

The saying ‘no fools like old fools’ came to mind: he and Barney had got too used to doing this shit – they’d trusted the intel, expected the expected and not looked hard enough at what was actually around them coming in. He cursed himself for leaving the truck near their entry-point _and_ leaving stuff inside it, too; Hector would have guys out who would find it and go through it before he could say, ‘Yes, that gas receipt _has_ got my card number on it, and that card _is_ registered to my actual shitty apartment. Please go there and turn it over for everything fucking else about me, and probably some about Barney as well!’ _Fuck. Fuck. Fuck._ Gunnar set his mouth into a grim line. He may as well still be sleep-walking through missions high if this was the kind of care he’d been taking without even thinking twice about it. He’d gotten complacent, and Barney had gotten tired, and no-one on the team was thinking about fail-safes and covering all the angles unless it was an all-guns-blazing, $10 mill earning, five-alarmer job being planned. 

They were at the elevator gate now, and Gunnar noted the level ‘1’ sprayed onto the floor by their feet. It made sense: the ground floor would be 1, with two levels below it and one above, plus the gantries; B2 was where Hector had directed them, so he guessed this lift was going down to the basement. How long would it take Lee and Hale to get in here and find them now they were moving further into the building? The unexpected earache Christmas must have earned from hearing Hector stamp on Barney’s mic had better have tipped them off that this wasn’t just a case of dodgy equipment giving out (although with the team’s usual ‘rust and electrical tape’ attitude to keeping their gear held together, that explanation was all too fucking plausible…). The drive from the mission control location to their entry-point had taken Gunnar 2 minutes going slowly, and working across from the fence to the buildings and through to the main factory unit was another 5 to 7 after that, if you were paying basic care to stealth it. Gunnar assumed that they would, to maximise the impact of being only two men, and because they would presumably be pretty concerned that the place was fuller and better defended than they’d first thought. Half of Gunnar considered that there was actually no operational sense _in_ them coming straight into a potentially hostile situation without arranging additional back-up again, especially since they couldn’t be sure what had gone wrong, but the other half of him was hoping desperately that Lee would be as considerate of risk-management as he usually was and just run the fuck in here to rescue them. 

_Them?_ Gunnar mentally corrected himself – actually they could concentrate on snatching Barney out of there and leave him to his own luck. Barney was the one who’d taken a bullet into somewhere; _he_ was the time-critical factor, and Gunnar didn’t give a shit about how he was going to get out of this himself compared to how much he wanted Barney to make it to medical attention fast. Okay, it was true that you didn’t do this job thinking you were bulletproof, or that everybody would always come back from every mission, but he’d sure as hell got into the truck this morning thinking they were both coming back from _this_ stupid little piece-of-shit factory recce. Fuck if he was going to lose Barney doing this of all things… 

On the elevator platform, Hector took charge of the controls and then took out his phone. Gunnar guessed he was sending a message to Vilain, and he wondered if he was close. The men pinning him between them were rooted to the spot like trees, and Gunnar couldn’t twist or force them around so that he could see how Barney was doing. That was agitating him more than Hector’s smug expression at whatever Vilain had texted him back, and he bit his lip to keep from starting something. There was no sense in provoking these guys; their best chance was to do the opposite. Instead he tried to listen for every sound over and above the elevator itself, then he tuned out his own breathing and the men beside him; how many more sets could he hear? Was that one shakier than the rest? Was that Barney? Having carried him onto the elevator, the men in charge of his partner had obviously set him down on the platform while it lowered, and Gunnar longed to try and catch a look at his face. If he wasn’t still unconscious, he would almost certainly be pretending he was, but Gunnar would only need one glance to be able to tell… God, he hoped he _was_. 

Barney had Kevlar on, he knew, and Gunnar hadn’t seen a lot of blood on the ground when they’d swung his body up before. Best case scenario was a hit somewhere easy and oozy, so he wasn’t bleeding out quickly and he could get mobile if he needed to. It was needling at him how fast and how hard Barney had dropped, though – you didn’t take a full count on the canvas for something trivial… _Shit_ , Gunnar didn’t know and couldn’t see, and it was only the fact that the men behind him weren’t saying ‘Hey, I think we got a stiff here now,’ that was reassuring him that Barney was still hanging in there. This was so much _not_ how it was supposed to go! It shouldn’t be this mission, it shouldn’t be now – right out of nowhere, and it certainly shouldn’t be the invincible fucking Barney Ross on his way out. Of all the Expendables and of all the times… If Gunnar had survived that shot above the heart in the warehouse eighteen months ago, then there was no justice if Barney died here; Gunnar had _deserved_ to die back then – hell, he should already have been dead, the amount of shit he’d been giving his body by that stage… 

The elevator jolted to a stop with an odd clang, and Gunnar saw he was right about it being the bottom floor. It had that bunker feeling that cellar levels always got – cold and damp and dim no matter how many construction lights you ran. His escorts manhandled him swiftly through the gate and out into a space demarcated by piles of boxes and crates. _There’s the armoury Church was after_ , he thought grimly. _It was certainly worth all of this to find out…_ Gunnar heard the goons behind him drag Barney from the elevator platform and roll him onto the concrete, and this time he managed to twist his neck sharply and finally take a look at his partner, before he was wrenched around to face Hector again. The man took obvious amusement from Gunnar’s concern to see. 

“Don’t panic, he doesn’t look dead.” Hector glanced down. “Yet.”

Gunnar bit back a snarl. He was right, though. Not conscious, by his reckoning, but not deathly pale either and his chest was moving. The blood was smearing around on his upper arm and his clothes were staining dark on that side, so it looked like a hit somewhere around the edge of the vest near his shoulder. Not so, so bad, from a survival point of view; just not something you wanted to leave unattended for all that long… 

“But he needs medical attention if your boss wants him alive,” Gunnar tried.

“You’ll have some time to wonder whether he _does_ , and if I’m going to provide it, while you’re answering my questions,” Hector replied. “Think about it when you respond: if you give me what I want fast enough, maybe I won’t finish him off.” 

_Fuck_. That probably meant Barney was a dead man. Not because Gunnar was going to dick this sick fuck around, but because he was pretty sure that Vilain already knew that anyone snooping into his affairs was likely to be doing it on Church’s dollar, and that there was nothing other than a confirmation and some free hits on a human target to be gained by interrogating him. Whatever bad-cop shit Vilain was letting Hector do here was for pleasure, not business, and the intended result was their two corpses regardless of how that happened. Barney was a dead man because they were both already dead men, unless Christmas was going to come early this year.

Hector nodded towards the goon on Gunnar’s right. “Arlo, get him comfortable for me.”

Gunnar felt the guy release his grip on his arm, then a freight train slammed into him.

 

***


	2. Against the fall, against the fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the end of part one, the boys had been taken down to the basement of Vilain's warehouse by Hector. Barney's badly injured, and Gunnar's facing interrogation - let's see 'em get out of this one!
> 
> As with the previous chapter, **this part includes swearing, mention of bloody violence and references to drug use.**

When Gunnar recovered his senses, he was flat on his back and tied down. Craning to see around him, he realised he was half-way over a table top, arms and torso bound to the flat of it and his bent knees hanging over the edge for his ankles to be tied to its legs. Okay… that wasn’t exactly the securest way of doing this – further points towards it being theatrical rather than essential. The splitting headache and throbbing across the right side of his face must have come courtesy of Arlo’s little love-tap, and Gunnar made a mental note to avoid fighting him if anything like an opportunity came his way: he obviously hit fast and hard and if he connected he didn’t need a second go.

Strangely, he seemed to be unattended. He could hear voices from somewhere nearby, but the dim corner that he was in – again boxed in by high piles of crates in semi-organised lines – was empty of people. Well, they had faith in Arlo’s fists, then. Clearly he wasn’t supposed to be awake. He tested the ropes around his arms. Was that going to be the mistake that gave them a shot at getting out of this? He wanted to look at his watch and work out how long they’d been in here. _Surely_ Christmas and Hale had to be doing something about getting to them by now? Maybe they were already there somewhere.

Gunnar worked one arm free and was just about to twist over to pull at the rest of the ropes when he heard the nearby conversation end. Cautious that it might mean imminent company, he settled for slipping the small blade he always kept taped to the inside of his belt out and into his hand, concealing it beneath his palm and fingers and trapping the loosened section of rope under his body so that it still appeared secure. Then he dropped his head back and closed his eyes. If he was lucky, this would be Hector on his own, and he’d come riiiiight up to him.

Footsteps did indeed move in his direction; the breathing and movement of one man audible. 

“Shhh, look at you, Gunnar Jensen.” 

Vilain’s voice, low and apparently speaking for no one else’s benefit, interrupted Gunnar’s mental planning like a newsflash. He recognised it straight away, familiar from the phone-tap audio files and surveillance footage Church had seen fit to supply them with. So the boss was in the house, and he already knew who they were? That was fast work from some angle. Gunnar didn’t carry anything on him that would give away his name, so either they’d already found the truck and done some amazingly quick detective-work, or Barney was awake and talking for some reason, or Hector had recognised him from somewhere and hadn’t chosen to mention it before… _Shit_ , for all he knew it was Vilain himself who could put a name to his face.

“You have a habit of being the mighty fallen,” Vilain murmured.

The man was close now – striking distance with the blade, and Gunnar’s nerves crackled with the urge to bring his right arm up, right shoulder over, and slash his neck or go through the eye into the brain if he could aim fast enough. He stayed still, though, caught up by Vilain’s strange tone of voice. 

“You have a habit… full stop.” 

Gunnar had to use every ounce of strength in his body not to flinch as Vilain took a loose hold on his left wrist and turned his arm over, and every second of his sniper training to keep his breathing even as the fingers of Vilain’s other hand brushed lightly over the inside of his forearm and elbow. 

“Oh, yes.” 

Gunnar knew what he was looking at; the track marks were plenty visible if you paid attention, even faded as they were now. There was no mistaking where he used to shoot up once he’d stopped bothering to hide it. Vilain’s fingers explored the skin with what felt like almost a _tender_ touch, carefully tracing one spot that Gunnar’s mind’s eye could picture exactly from where he was pressing – a tiny row of particularly obvious punctures, over-used and infection-scarred. He’d been meaning to get Tool to ink over the lot of it, but kept hesitating at the thought of him touching them, seeing them so close-up and intimate. They were the chink in his armour that everybody politely ignored; his self-inflicted weak-spot, and now Jean Vilain was stroking it over like any moment he could slip his fingers through and press on Gunnar’s raw nerve ends from the inside. It was setting off all sorts of insane signals in his brain, finally triggering a flicker of muscle movement that Vilain mistook for him coming around.

“Awake, now?”

Gunnar played along. Chance to surprise him long missed. He made an inarticulate sound before opening his eyes and focussing slightly off Vilain’s gaze for a second. Must have been convincing enough, as he saw the man’s lips quirk a little.

“Felt that one hard, huh, Gunnar? Did Arlo get a lucky shot, or are you getting too old for this?”

He didn’t answer.

Vilain had slipped his fingers away from his arm, and was resting them on the edge of the table as though they’d always been there. Shame it wasn’t on his other side, Gunnar thought, where he could have grabbed Vilain’s wrist and broken it easily with his free, dominant hand. The blade still sat warm under his palm, and he assessed his options again: Vilain had the standing advantage, but Gunnar had surprise and a ready-weapon to his gain, and once he was up he would have significant weight and height on the man. He wondered where Vilain’s skills lay; Gunnar knew he was a fighter, but that made two of them… His build looked lean and powerful, and with the cut-glass cheekbones and the odd scars on his forehead, he came across as a strange mix of distinguished and rough. How many men did he have in shouting distance? Did Gunnar have any chance of a silent kill?

Vilain looked impassively down at him, as though he knew Gunnar was running the options and was merely waiting to see if he came up with anything. He was standing so close that Gunnar could even feel the heat and position of his body exactly, and that in itself seemed like a warning sign. Anyone else would have moved back and put at least an arm’s length distance between them once he knew his prisoner was conscious again; Vilain clearly didn’t think he needed the space, and it meant that either he was completely stupid or completely sure of himself. Gunnar didn’t like the call. It looked like this guy was a psych-merchant, and he was loath to admit that it was already working. No doubt Hector was pissed that he wasn’t getting his interrogation after all, but apparently Vilian did this part better himself.

What _was_ he going to do? Another few chances slipping by… Every time Vilain blinked, every second that no one else was with them… 

“You’re the strong, silent type,” Vilain suddenly remarked. “Don’t you want to ask what I’ve done with your comrade?”

Gunnar did, but he wasn’t going to.

“You don’t want to force some hint about where he is? If he’s in a state to move? That would just make good sense, Gunnar. Aren’t you even thinking about getting out?”

He was, and this fuck knew it all too well.

“Ask me how I know _you_ , then. Or do you remember?”

 _Game-player._ They’ve never met.

Vilain laughed a little then and the table rocked where his hip was pressed up against it. “It’ll come.”

Gunnar’s rational mind knew what Vilain was doing. He knew this kind of scenario exactly, and he knew that he only had to blank him. He just wished that he didn’t have a memory full of blanks to start with, because – _of course_ – his neurotic, irrational mental screamtrain was already freewheeling. They could have met. 

Vilain might have called him strong, but Gunnar could tell that he had a pretty good handle on how to make him weak, and he hated that he was sharp enough to be aware of it happening yet bad at resisting it. He bet Vilain got an extra kick out of that. _Yeah._

Gunnar closed his eyes. So he wasn’t moving for a moment, attacking, getting out of there, rescuing Barney… He was gathering his thoughts, and then the next moment would begin, and he’d run his options again.

Beside him, Vilain shifted slightly, the table creaking as he leant a fraction more heavily on it. “And when you open them again I’ll still be here…” His tone was playful, teasing, and Gunnar hated him all the more for it. The situation _was_ like a bad dream, and Vilain didn’t have to be a genius to figure out how much Gunnar didn’t want to be in this position, but he’d rather be roughed around than mocked for it. Now he kept his eyes closed deliberately, even though he’d have preferred the advantage of sight. For all his dumb behaviour, Gunnar wasn’t stupid, and he could fuck people back a little when they were messing with him. That might have been what Vilain wanted – some kind of engagement – but the action was a simple barrier too. Not looking, not talking: see no evil, speak no evil.

“Are you a religious man, Gunnar?”

It was an interesting way of asking if he’d been to Church recently, Gunnar supposed. _Try a different tac. If you do know me, you’d know I don’t need to show off how fast I am on the uptake_.

“Maybe you’ll be attending a funeral soon?” Vilain paused, and the table top moved again as he flexed his hands against it, one foot scuffing the concrete floor. “I left Hector with your man, so the odds are good by now…”

Inside, Gunnar’s stomach reacted, guts wrenching and cold nausea rising, but he marshalled his face to remain so neutral that it hurt to hold the expression still. _I know he’s dead. What do you think it’s going to gain you? You think that’s going to motivate me to save my own life?_ He wondered if Vilain suspected that he and Barney were more than colleagues; he wondered if he knew: ‘your man’ covered a range of possibilities, but Vilain came across as someone who liked to use words very precisely. 

_Motherfucker…_ Gunnar was starting to piece this all together now, and he didn’t like the scenarios he was coming up with. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident that Church’s intel was off, and maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that what info was there had easily presented Barney and he to be the guys on the ground. Once they were inside, it didn’t matter which one of them stuck around as Vilain’s bait: if it was Barney, the rest of the Expendables would move hell or high water to rescue him; if it was Gunnar, Barney would make sure the same thing happened. Pretty soon, no more Expendables, and Vilain would have a fat paycheck while Church would have ample revenge for the Vilena result. It was almost too simple. 

Aggravated by the realisation, Gunnar abruptly opened his eyes and met Vilain’s stare exactly, seeing the lines around _his_ eyes crinkle as he reacted; he was smiling. 

“You remembered my face?” Vilain asked. 

_No_. Nothing was coming back because _nothing was there._ “I had a vision of it…” Gunnar began, voice low. Vilain’s eyebrow rose a tiny fraction, smile still tracing his lips, and Gunnar’s blade burned under his hand. “It was…” He paused again, feeling the intensity and anticipation coiled in him mirroring back in Vilain’s eyes, “a _death mask_.” Then Gunnar sprang up, the loose ropes easily furling out and letting him drive the knife straight towards the bastard’s jugular.

Vilain’s smile vanished in an instant, replaced by snarling teeth as he whipped his head around and dodged the hit by millimetres. _Fuck_ , he _was_ fast – that would have been a killing blow on anyone else! Feet on the ground now, and pulling the table with him where it was still bound to his other limbs, Gunnar shouldered hard into Vilain and sent him backwards fast. “Fuck you!” he growled, fingers re-gripping the blade around in preparation for a second strike. 

Vilain got ground between them quickly, his agile frame recovering from the stagger and putting him away from Gunnar’s reach as he slipped his own knife out. Gunnar was infuriated that now he’d caught his balance and equalled their positions again, the smile had immediately returned to Vilain’s face.

“You remind me why I liked you in the first place,” Vilain called. “So close, too.”

Gunnar took the few second’s grace he gave him to slip free of the table properly and get into a better stance. Was a knife fight with this guy smart or not? Vilain was handling his blade like it was part of his body, movements fluid and practised. Yeah, this was fucking dangerous now, but what did he have to lose? Gunnar faked like he was going to circle left, about to charge him again instead and hope that sheer force of will was going to get him a connection. Vilain was already moving, lightning quick… 

_Lightning…_

The room exploded in blinding white light, Gunnar’s hearing overpowered into a ringing mess and the pain in his skull flaring so suddenly and excruciatingly that the flood of blackness following hard upon it didn’t seem like the worst thing that could be happening. Was this inside _him_? Was he haemorrhaging from before? Was Vilain’s knife in his head? He felt the ground hitting his back, scraping down his spine, disappearing as he sank through it and the dull grip of dark fingers dragged at him. He wanted to throw up, or hold his palms against his face; to hold himself together, but he couldn’t fight the hands that had his wrists, pulling him down. Okay, so there was nothing he could do, nothing he could move… His mind swung from reeling to unreal clarity in the time it took him to lose the feeling of his lower body completely. This must be it – the hit he wasn’t coming back from, the one you never saw coming.

 _That white light, it was so close in the end,_ he told himself ruefully. But the noise and the pain and the darkness had surrounded him, and he was still falling, half-dragged and half-numb. Where was Barney now? The last trace of Gunnar’s rational mind reassured him that it didn’t matter, because none of these final moment feelings and visions really meant anything; yet it somehow felt important that his last thought would be about him… about them. Then the blackness became all-encompassing, fading him out like a film. _It was always going to end like this_.

 

“Gunnar! Gunnar, get the fuck up and MOVE!”

The feeling of hands gripping his wrists zinged back into his awareness as though he’d been shot with adrenaline. Caesar, huge and shaking with effort, was dragging him bodily through some kind of brick corridor.

“Come on, you bastard,” he was shouting. “Come around before I have to leave your ass here to get blown up when their fucking armoury goes. I can’t get us both out if you don’t start moving!” 

“Caesar,” he rasped.

“Yeah!” The relief in Hale’s voice was palpable. “Now get on your feet, soldier.” 

Gunnar groaned as he was pulled unceremoniously over from his back onto his front and half-yanked up to his knees. He managed to get himself the rest of the way and start stumbling along beside his teammate, leaning hard on Hale’s shoulder.

“Thought I was fucking dead back there.”

“From a flash grenade? No way, but we _are_ dead if we don’t get through this sewer before the fire in that basement lights the munitions up.”

“My head…” Gunnar tried to offer an explanation. “I got hit by some fucking giant.”

“Shut up talking and get faster, buddy. We’ll get your head checked out when we’re clear of here. Maybe you got some sanity knocked back into you?”

Gunnar concentrated on moving for a minute, his battle-hardened body coming back to him and digging deep into its reserves of experience at getting out of the shit. 

“Up here!” Hale exclaimed as they reached a ladder bolted to the side of the wall, leading upwards. “We gotta get up through this inspection hole.”

Gunnar saw blood on the wall by the bottom of the ladder and on the ground, and his brain suddenly jolted back into action again. “Barney?!”

“He’s out. He and Lee came through here before us. Now get up there!”

Oh god, Barney wasn’t dead! Gunnar almost felt like sagging against the wall and sinking down onto the floor himself, but Caesar was already pushing him at the rungs and shoving him upwards, and Gunnar had to focus on his hands and feet and making it to the bright circle of light marking the street above them. They were a metre or so from the top when they heard the deep boom of the basement igniting behind them, and the rumble of the blast as it tore along the tunnel they’d come through.

“Move, _move_ ,” Hale yelled, his strong shoulders practically heaving Gunnar out of the manhole from below. He rolled over a couple of times, scrambling away across the gravel that surrounded the opening just in time for Hale to clear the hole himself and avoid the roaring backdraft. “Shit, we made it!” 

Gunnar stared at the sky, catching his breath. The leftover ringing in his ears from the flash grenade was so much more noticeable now he was still, and the pain and nausea was redoubling in the bright daylight. They seemed to be lying on some waste ground… “Where the fuck are we? Where did Christmas take Barney?” 

All he had were questions. _How the hell had this all gotten so fucked up?_

 

***


	3. Count the changes, count the cost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, Lee and Hale might have managed to pull off a rescue, but now everyone has to deal with the fallout... 
> 
> Yeah, Gunnar is pretty bad at dealing with the fallout. 
> 
>  
> 
> **This part includes swearing and mention of injuries and blood.**

It turned out that Christmas had done the only sane thing he could have, given the situation, and taken Barney to the nearest emergency room. By the time Gunnar and Caesar got there he was already getting treatment, and Lee was more than keen to corner Gunnar and fire twenty questions at him about what had gone down in the warehouse. Apparently he wasn’t very satisfied with his patchy answers, either. Well that made two of them, Gunnar had snarled at him, because he was hardly ecstatic about the way the mission had fallen to pieces! And if he hadn’t been so preoccupied trying to find out what was going on with his lover, he’d have had some questions of his own as well, like why had rescuing them needed to involve razing the whole _urban, highly visible_ warehouse to the ground before they were even clear of it, and did they have any fucking idea whether Vilain and Hector had or hadn’t survived it? 

To Lee’s credit, he was all primed and ready to go back to the site and scope out the emergency service clean-up, mind firmly on getting any evidence of the Expendables’ presence to disappear from the whole sorry clusterfuck. He and Caesar left Gunnar alone at the hospital to have lights shone into his eyes and ears, and pointed questions raised about his scars, and he was actually completely relieved that they’d gone. He could do without carrying on a tense debrief through the corridors and hallways of St. Whatever-the-fuck, especially when his brain felt like stirred-up shit. Waiting around to hear that Barney was out of surgery gave his mind plenty of time to fixate on the image of Vilain’s nasty smile vanishing behind the blinding flash of Caesar’s grenade, and the thought of how close he and Barney had come to oblivion that afternoon, instead. 

 

***

 

Later at home in the crappy little bathroom of his apartment, Gunnar found himself fixated again, staring at his own face in the mirror above the sink and frowning hard. He wondered how Barney was feeling right now; whether he had fully shaken off all the anaesthesia yet. Maybe he should have stayed at the hospital until he did, so that Barney wouldn’t just be there alone – that was what you were _supposed_ to do, right? Sit by the person’s bedside and hold their hand; that was how lovers were meant to be. He watched an expression of pain pass across his eyes as he thought of Barney waking up to no-one. It turned to one of anger as he wondered if the nurse who’d suggested he was better off going home and coming back first thing in the morning was just trying to get his 6’5” bloodied-up, intimidating carcass out of their way. Yeah, he didn’t exactly look the part. If he’d been a clean and crying wife, sitting prettily at Barney’s side, would that have made a difference? Would he have been encouraged to stay instead, reassured and comforted? They’d barely even taken the time to patch up his face, and he could hardly have failed to notice the security guards following his every move. Wouldn’t happen in a field hospital… Then again, Barney would be dead in a field hospital. At least he was getting the treatment he needed; his paperwork proved he could write big enough cheques for it, and that was what it took. 

The adrenaline rush from the mission was well and truly gone now, replaced by a sickening low that dropped Gunnar’s heart into his guts. He turned on the tap and splashed lukewarm water onto his face, his mind slipping into the mental ritual he carried out every time something went to hell. He’d turn the series of events over in his head and search for reasons for the failure, rerunning it again and again until he had found all the flaws… all the things _he’d_ said or done that had contributed to the fuck-up. It was the same routine he’d always followed, ever since childhood. As his father had so ‘gently’ taught him – a man who couldn’t learn from his mistakes was no better than the fly that hurled itself again and again at a window glass.

Gunnar looked back into the mirror, meeting his own eyes once more. So, what had he done wrong this time? The truck, for one thing. Caesar had risked going back to pick it up while he was at the hospital, so Gunnar guessed it was at Tool’s place now. He’d go down there in a while and check what state it was in and what was still inside after – he assumed – Hector and his goons had gone through it. He supposed it _was_ just a matter of time before they came to this apartment, now. And that carelessness was on him – there shouldn’t have been one scrap of personal stuff left in his vehicle when they were going on a job, no matter how innocuous it might have seemed. Their fucking situation right now was an object lesson! Hector would use the receipts, the junk, the shit in the trunk, to piece together where he lived and where he went, and Gunnar should not have made it that fucking easy for him to do it. 

It wasn’t as if he was even that attached to this apartment, but leaving it was more than just a case of moving and all the hassle that came with it; he’d have to pay out to keep renting it empty, at least for a while, and keep an eye on it so that no one came along and squatted the place… He didn’t need a firebombed family on his conscience if Hector happened to show up to waste him _after_ it re-rented. 

_Urgh_. He shook his head and wished he hadn’t. It still didn’t feel clear, and he turned the tap back on to splash his face again. Why wasn’t somebody calling him to check in? Christmas… Or the hospital… What if there was a problem with his phone? What if there was a problem with Barney? Should _he_ call them? Perhaps if he’d been a bit straighter with the doctor about the concussion he’d received they would have been a little less hasty to urge him home in the first place, no matter how uncomfortable his presence made them feel. Too late now. Too late for a lot of things. _Shit_ , he should never have parked the truck so close to the warehouse – he was asking Vilain and his cronies to find it. Then, on the ground, he had failed to spot an ambush situation until they were right inside it, and he’d been completely unable to prevent Barney being hit. 

Suddenly the face in the mirror drained of all colour as that realisation really struck him. Barney had _really_ got shot on this mission, right in front of him; he’d _really_ been five feet away and there wasn’t one damn thing he could have done to stop it. Gunnar squeezed his eyes tight shut in disbelief and gripped the edge of the basin, wet hands slipping against the porcelain. It had been sheer luck this afternoon. If Vilain’s goons had been a better shot, if Barney had been bending a fraction further forward as he ran… the bullet would have gone straight into his neck. He wouldn’t be in the hospital now. He’d be dead. 

_His lover would be dead and Gunnar wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop it._

He gripped the sink tighter and swallowed hard as his stomach lurched with nausea and the water dripping down his face prickled ice cold.

 _Just like that, he would have been dead._

No fight… no warning… no graceful decline into old age and final succumbing to illness. No time even to say goodbye to him. 

_Just dead._

And how had he reacted while he was standing there watching Barney’s body fall to the floor? He had put his gun on the ground and saved his own skin. He had an assault rifle in his hand, pointing it at the man who, for all he knew, had just killed his lover, and he had put it down on the ground. Why hadn’t he blown the bastard away? It would have been easy. It would have taken a split second. Pull the trigger; watch the killer fall like Barney had fallen. Every instinct he had should have been telling him to do it; his body should have done it without him even thinking… knowing, even. That was what Gunnar _did_. Why the hell had his insane will to fight failed him just exactly when he’d needed it the most? 

Because it would have meant his own certain death?

He might have shot one of the goons, maybe even got around quick enough to get another one, but after that it would have been easy for any of the others to pick him off. Shot in the back, the ultimate disgrace. And no matter how many times in the last year he had found himself thinking that it was Barney by his side that had made his life worth living again, when it had actually come down to it, he hadn’t even been able to take revenge against the man he thought had killed him. It didn’t matter that he knew now that Barney was alive – it mattered that for those seconds when he didn’t know, he hadn’t felt angry and he hadn’t felt anguish or any of those other things that you were supposed to feel when someone close to you died, and nor had his soldier auto-pilot kicked in and dulled his emotions to keep his trigger finger moving. He had felt something else, and that was fear; utterly selfish fear for his own sorry life. What kind of man did that make him? How could he ever look Barney in the face again, knowing what he _hadn’t_ done when his lover was lying senseless at his feet?

He opened his eyes again and stared at himself in the mirror, and the horror in his expression reflected back at him. The face was a mask of contempt and revulsion. 

_Damn you, Gunnar Jensen. You are no better than a fly. Symbol of plague and famine, spreader of poison and disease!_

Before he knew it he heard his own voice tearing out of him, sending a tirade of the worst insults and all-encompassing fury towards the mirror. He shouted the filthiest words he could think of, the most degrading words, as though the torrent of anger would obliterate the man shouting back at him. His fingers clawed at the basin and the taps, wanting to destroy the things around him, and when they got up to the mirror to scrabble at the edges and try to rip it off the wall, blood started smearing over the glass and the tiles from his shredded nails and jagged cuts.

The moment seemed to stretch on and on as he cried and tore at the wall, until Gunnar felt like he had been shouting for hours. Finally, exhausted and head-spinning, he had to stop. The figure in the mirror stumbled back and heaved up bile into the sink. He was breathing erratically and his throat stung, and he didn’t feel one ounce better. 

“Damn you,” he rasped. _“Fuck you!”_

 

***

 

The bedroom was almost completely dark when he woke up to the _brrrrr_ of his text message tone, eyes adjusting slowly with the help of the dim orange glow of the city streetlights coming through the open blinds. He rolled over and grabbed up the phone from where it lay on the mattress beside him. His head didn’t make the roll as well as his body did, and he had to hold still for a second to let the spin and the nausea ease back. Hey, at least he _had_ woken up. The thought of the hospital trying to inform his cerebrally haemorrhaged corpse that Barney was also dead was macabre and somehow hilarious to him in equal measure. But this couldn’t be them, right? Since when did the hospital text? He read the screen and frowned – it was Tool telling him that Barney was awake and as cranky as you’d expect him to be after being shot and patched up again. Gunnar was relieved, but why was Tool there? Why was Tool suddenly getting the next-of-kin treatment when _he_ was the one who’d been at the hospital earlier, doing all the paperwork, all the panicking? Barney was _his_ partner. What the fuck?

He dropped the phone down and lay back heavily on the pillow. Okay, so maybe Barney and Tool had a history of this that they’d just fallen back into without thinking. Gunnar knew they’d served and fought and stood back to back with each other for years before he’d even known them – real brothers in arms. Maybe Barney automatically went for the person he’d always trusted in situations like this; he’d once said that it felt like he and Tool knew each other backwards. Gunnar was pretty pissed that he seemed to be a remote second, though… A text message for your lover? Like, ‘Hi, I’m alive!’ And it wasn’t even that – it was a message from _someone else_. What was he expected to text back? ‘That’s great, thanks for letting me know my husband isn’t dead!’

He caught himself by surprise, thinking of it that way; the second time his mind had gone to a marriage analogy since this afternoon… yesterday afternoon? What time was it anyway? Fuck, they’d been committed to each other for more than a year now, and Gunnar was pretty sure neither of them had any plans to change that, so for all intents and purposes he may as well think of Barney like that. His medical records just hadn’t caught up with the times, listing his ‘brother’ under next-of-kin. That was all it was.

He should get up and go down there. He was still dressed, and it wasn’t _that_ far a walk without having the truck outside. Not that he probably ought to be driving anyway – sitting up to check the clock on the phone told him that the dizziness from this damn concussion wasn’t getting any easier, and that it was two o’clock in the morning.

What would a normal person do now? Ring back, he supposed. 

 

//Hey.// Barney’s voice was quiet, but at least it was him and not Tool who answered. Gunnar wasn’t sure he’d have been able to start the conversation without saying something petulant to him, else. 

“Hey.”

//Are you okay?// 

“I got brained by some guy twice _my_ size. Concussion, but I’ve had worse. It doesn’t compare to you.”

//I guess. Look, sleep it off and come and bust me out of here tomorrow?//

“You know they’re not gonna let you go one day after they pull a bullet out of you.”

//Well, they’re not going to stop me unless they want to get the cops in here to make things awkward about what actually happened.//

“They been pushing that, yet?”

//Not yet. Anyone who isn’t an idiot can tell what I do for a living, looking at my med files. Staff aren’t asking questions and I doubt anyone here even actually gives a shit – they just have to report firearms injuries when they see ‘em. I want to be out before 5-0 actually turn up to speak to me about it.//

Gunnar tried to keep his voice even. “Tool’s there, right? Can’t he spring you?”

//Yeah Tool’s here, but…//

Gunnar could hear Tool’s muffled voice in the background, and it irked him that Barney had obviously covered the mouthpiece to talk to him.

//Gunnar?//

He didn’t say anything. Where was he going to have gone in ten seconds?

//Listen, it’s 2 AM and we’re both pretty beaten-up. It’s a bad time to be talking over the phone, and I want to _see you_ instead. Tomorrow, when we’re feeling better.//

“You want to see me, but I’m not the one who gets the call to come in like Tool?” Gunnar couldn’t help himself. “You forget the last year suddenly? Who I am?”

//What? Fuck, Gunnar. Like I said, this is obviously a bad time and a bad way to be talking right now.//

Gunnar heard him sigh heavily and knew that he’d already been hearing the tiredness and meds in his voice. Barney was right in what he was saying… It just didn’t make him feel any better about the fact that they weren’t there together in the first place. He swallowed saying that out loud and went for the easy line instead.

“Sorry. I know. I’m… sick and tired as well. Just…”

//Yeah?//

“You’re my next-of-kin.”

He guessed Barney would know what he meant, and hung up before he replied. 

 

***


	4. Keep your station, draw the curtain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gunnar brings Barney home; cue some awkward conversations.
> 
>  
> 
> **As with previous chapters, this part includes swearing and mention of injuries and blood.**

When the morning rolled around and his phone woke him up for the second time, now with its reedy alarm clock tone, Gunnar played the ‘What would a normal person do?’ game again and took a shower and made himself look less like a frightening war-casualty for his next visit to the hospital. Then he walked to Tool’s to get the truck back. It was parked up in the garage looking oddly untouched, and it crossed his mind that maybe Hector hadn’t found it… Either that, or he’d searched it carefully enough to make Gunnar think he hadn’t. Pity he couldn’t remember accurately enough where all of the junk lying around in it had been to be able to tell if things were different or not. Caesar wouldn’t have got in it and driven without checking whether it had been rigged or sabotaged though, so he figured that at least it was safe to use it.

The keys were there, so Gunnar just got in and took it, grateful for not running into Tool or anyone else and thereby avoiding any more questions about what the hell had happened at the warehouse yesterday. Tool already had Barney’s side of the ambush and its aftermath, Gunnar supposed, but he hadn’t yet worked out what he was going to say about his little run-in with Vilain while they were separated. Telling the truth? That maybe it wasn’t the first time they’d met… but _if_ it wasn’t, he couldn’t actually remember another time; all he knew was that Vilain seemed ‘intimately’ certain about it? Yeah, that was going to go down well with everybody. But if he kept the details to himself, then it was he and Vilain’s dirty little secret, which he had a feeling was exactly what the slick bastard was hoping it would be – a mindfuck-à-deux. Gunnar grimaced and forced his mind to focus on the road instead. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it, and hope that in the meantime he either had a flash of insight that confirmed Vilain’s hints one way or another, or that he could come up with a good enough lie about the conversation in that strange quarter-hour they’d spent together to avoid all the questions and accusations that the rest of the Expendables were bound to respond with.

The hospital turned out to be a lot less interested in bureaucracy and having law-enforcement crawling all over the place than they were in confirming the financial side of everything and getting Barney’s bed freed up as fast as possible, and Gunnar found himself gathering up an ominous bag of meds and a pile of paperwork and helping Barney check himself out with seemingly ridiculous haste.

“We’ve been in this situation enough times before,” Barney reminded him when he voiced that out loud. “Sometimes they just want the big, dirty mercs out and as far away from them as possible, and the cops _know_ that even if they do start lookin’ into me, sooner or later down the line they’re gonna run into the memo from above that tells them to ‘drop it’ and doesn’t say why. Saves the bother for everyone, this way.”

Yeah, I’m completely unbothered that I’m going home to a shitty, possibly dangerously compromised apartment with my lover who’s been shot in the arm only yesterday, Gunnar thought, but kept his mouth shut. He had a feeling he was going to be doing that a lot over the next little while, starting with swallowing down the urge to just tell Barney that it was a better idea for him to stay in the hangar, or at Tool’s even, than to be at his place where they were probably an easy target for Vilain and Hector if they were still among the living. 

He wished that Caesar’s fucking grenade had hit a bit further away from him and closer to his captor, then maybe he would have been more confident in thinking that Vilain had been trapped or incapacitated before the ammo cache had blown the basement to smithereens. As it was, Gunnar couldn’t help but assume that the wily bastard would have found a way out – or been helped by his other men – just as Gunnar himself had. Vilain had a reputation for his cat-like quantity of lives, and that seemed to go alongside his fast, supple way of moving and his sharp features all too well. Gunnar frowned. If Vilain was their feline hunter, what did that make them? Something to toy with? Yeah, from everything Vilain had said to him so far, that felt about right.

Barney was understandably subdued and looking so rough that Gunnar, for better or worse, just couldn’t start up with the ‘risks and logistics’ speeches and the awkward admissions of his failure that would need to come along with them. He’d have to bank on the fact that _everyone_ , friend or foe, was surprised and regrouping after what had happened. Even if Vilain and Hector had the nod from Church that Barney and Gunnar were going to show up to the warehouse, they couldn’t have predicted that the outcome was going to be the destruction of everything they had stored there… He almost had to smile at that one: the conversation that would be going on between Vilain (if he lived) and Mr Smugfuck after that would be something to be a fly on the wall for.

 

Inside the apartment, he left Barney to make his own call about where he wanted to put himself – not that either his shitty and cheap bed _or_ the couch was especially comfortable – and went quickly into the bathroom to clean the blood off the mirror; something he should have done before he even left the place this morning. Another reminder that he wasn’t thinking straight about any of this shit… Blood around the sink or on the bedsheets was easy to explain away; handprints and scrawling trails across the shaving mirror were the signs of some fucking maniac at work! He ruined a towel that had already seen better days doing it. Just another thing to take on the furtive midnight trip to the local coin-op that Gunnar ended up making after most missions with the Expendables. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. 

When he came out of the bathroom, Barney was sitting heavily on the bed, the washed-out sunlight from the still open blinds catching half his face and leaving the rest of his profile in shadow. Even before the added bruising and cuts, Barney’s skin was reddened, dry and burnt from spending too long out in windswept deserts over the last few months. Gunnar supposed he looked the same; worse, even – it wasn’t as if his fair colouring was any match for the greenhouse effect. He wanted to walk across from the doorway and brush the back of his hand down the side of Barney’s face, skim his fingers along the hairline and get a feel for the lines and cracks he was looking at. He didn’t move, though. He wasn’t usually self-conscious about touching or being touched, but ever since they got out of that warehouse – ever since that bastard Vilain had his hands running so casually all over those scars on his arm – he’d started to prickle at the thought of it, like his skin was polluted. The last thing Barney needed was his tainted fingers handing off all of that on him, not while he was healing.

Gunnar swallowed uncomfortably, because maybe his touch was exactly what Barney wanted. It was the kind of thing that made up that critical extra dimension that reassured you, when you came back from the dead, that you weren’t just imagining it all; that your corporeality was a matter of fact, and you _could_ still grip the hand of your lover, still have them hold you back. Sure, Gunnar had done all the right things so far – held Barney steady on the stairs, shielded his bad side getting in and out of the truck – helped in all the ways you _had_ to help someone when they were hurt. He was just overlooking the little things he could be doing that no one else was capable of; the ‘close’ stuff that the nurses wouldn’t, Tool wouldn’t… the stupid little shit between two people that marks them out as something more to each other. Gunnar was pretty sure that Barney wanted some of that from him, and he couldn’t bring himself to actually fucking do it.

Instead, he hovered awkwardly in the doorway between the bathroom and the bedroom and stared at Barney’s hands – he wasn’t wearing his rings. Was that just because of the hospital stuff? They made you take all your shit off, didn’t they?

“Are you okay?”

Gunnar snapped out of it and met Barney’s concerned gaze. “Yeah, I was just thinking…”

“About yesterday?” Barney shook his head slowly. “What the fuck happened, Gunnar? I mean, we fucked up there, obviously; I didn’t see _shit_ coming before I got hit, and that’s fuckin’ poor, but… what we thought we were walking into – from Church’s intel – that was not what was there on the ground.”

Gunnar nodded. “Barney, you know I don’t trust him anyway, but after this I’m calling bullshit outright. That intel made it look like the place was all but deserted, just storage; then we get in and it’s a three-ring circus, with Vilain and his guy right there. _Really?_ ”

“So you think Church set us up, too?” Barney sighed and leant back carefully, his good arm taking his weight as he swung his legs up to sit fully on the bed. “Fuck… I don’t even want to think about how we’re gonna deal with him trying to put us out of commission. He nearly fuckin’ just did it!”

Gunnar didn’t want to think about that either; Church was a bad bastard to be up against. “Nearly. But then we took out the warehouse. Is that what he would’ve wanted in the end, or is that gonna have upped the ante even more?”

“He probably wanted the weapons himself. He always wants the win-win scenario: Vilain kills us; probably then Church gets rid of him as well, before helping himself to what’s been left behind.”

“So why not deal with Vilain for the fucking weapons, if he was dealing with him anyway? It’s not like the government doesn’t have bottomless pockets.”

“Because he’s working off the record? He wants Vilain out of the way as well as us? He’s a fucking tightwad? Who fuckin’ knows?”

Gunnar knew that neither he, Hale nor Lee had seen Vilain alive _or_ dead before the warehouse blew. “Did _we_ take out Vilain?”

“We need to hear what Lee and Hale saw when they went back. All I can say for sure is that we left his Russian bastard sidekick bleeding out with a knife in his back when we got out of there.”

“So _he’s_ probably dead; that’s something.” Having Hector out of the picture was definitely a weight off Gunnar’s mind, if it was true. It made him feel a little bit more secure where they were, at least, even if that was a false sense of security since Church himself could easily track them down…

“Gunnar?”

 _Yeah?_ Was this going to be the question he'd been hoping Barney wouldn’t ask? Gunnar deliberately looked away out of the window so that his expression would be obscured against the light before he answered aloud. “Yes?”

“Tool told me that Hale said you were fighting with Vilain when he found you. What happened?”

“I was fighting to escape.”

“I meant before that. I assumed _that_. When I woke up and we were separated, Hector was giving me all this shit about how you were getting tortured, probably dead – I figured just to wind me up. But now I’ve seen your face, and this fuckin’ blood everywhere!” Barney gestured at the pillow beside him. There was dried blood from where Gunnar had lain on it last night, the broken skin at his hairline still seeping where it had been stitched, and streaks and dabs on the sheets from the cuts on his fingers and hands.

Gunnar let out a breath, relieved that Barney was making it sound like Hector and Vilain had been playing the same mind games with both of them. That made it much more likely that Vilain had been lying about knowing him before, about… whatever else he’d been trying to intimate during that ‘interrogation’. “Vilain was giving me the same story; you were dead, I would be soon. All of that.”

“Did you-”

“-tell him anything? No!” Gunnar interrupted, looking at Barney sharply. “What would I have said?”

There was a pause as Barney frowned and swallowed carefully before continuing.

“-believe him, was what I was going to say. Back in that warehouse, did you think I was dead?”

 _Yes_. “No.”

Gunnar didn’t even know why he lied. He’d thought that Barney was going to ask about the specifics of Vilain’s conversation with him, and had just about readied himself to lie about that. This, though? He was pretty firmly aware that admitting to your lover that you thought they were dead after they got shot at point blank range wasn’t taboo; it was actually a fucking reasonable thing to think! Maybe he just couldn’t face what Barney might have asked him next. He might have asked him how he felt – how he’d reacted, and that was exactly what had got him trying to tear strips out of his own reflection last night, cleaning blood off the mirror today.  


Some things were just easier kept to yourself.

 _You’re alive, but I couldn’t save you. I love you, but I didn’t avenge you. You’re alive, but…_ His inner-voice faltered. _I can't stop thinking that I should be dead._


	5. I see no more and I don't recall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four days after the mission blew up, everyone's still holed up licking their wounds.
> 
>  
> 
> **This part includes swearing and mention of injuries.**

From the smoky darkness the snake advances towards him, slithers around his feet... but Gunnar doesn’t move.

He doesn’t know why.

And he can’t see more than a few feet ahead of him for a haze of smoke hanging in the air and a heavy black curtain of darkness. He has no idea where he is or why he’s there, but he doesn’t care; he only knows he feels safe. Breathing in, all he inhales is smoke, but it feels like the most natural thing in the world. He breathes deeper, relaxing completely.

He watches quietly as the snake weaves around his ankles, slowly figure-eighting, briefly binding him before turning back on itself and unwinding. The snake has a beautiful body, Gunnar notes... so smooth. He can see the muscles rippling under its skin as it moves. He stares at it, transfixed, as it begins a tempered exploration of his body. Its darting tongue flicks in and out against his skin, tasting him.

Drawing itself upwards it winds around his legs, thousands of tiny scales brushing across his damp skin, sending shockwaves through his naked body which somehow never reach his brain. The skin of the snake is cool and dry and each deliberate, tantalisingly slow movement of its perfect body leaves a trail over Gunnar’s thigh where the little rivulets of sweat seeping from his flesh are gently brushed away.

He can feel nothing but the dull weight of the snake as it eases itself higher up his body, almost reaching his groin now. He closes his eyes against the cloying darkness surrounding him as he concentrates on the rhythmic clench and release of the body weaving around his thigh, undulating and rolling itself on upwards. The snake grips Gunnar’s flesh firmly as it dips its head into the space between his legs, pausing for a split second in the heat between his inner thighs before moving on through his legs and up towards the small of his back.

Gunnar lets his head drop to his chest as he fixes his attention on the progress of the snake behind him, carving a path up his spine. As the snake hauls itself higher it feels as though it’s becoming heavier, unbalancing him. He puts a little more energy into keeping himself upright. As he breathes he can feel the warmth of the smoke in his lungs and all around him, enveloping his body both inside and out. 

Time seems to slow down as the snake makes its journey around him and for what seems like hours Gunnar remains completely still, breathing the smoke and letting the snake caress his back. It rubs itself along his shoulder blades and the top of his spine, the sensitive tongue tasting the salt of his sweat as the movement of the body massages him, relaxing him even further.

Sleepily, Gunnar realises he’s beginning to struggle to feel every movement the snake makes now; it’s getting more difficult to concentrate. It’s as though everything is coming at him through a layer of molasses; it’s a vaguely familiar and not unpleasant feeling.

Suddenly he becomes fully aware of the snake again, reappearing casually at his shoulder. He forces his head back up, swaying slightly as the blood shifts inside him. He’s dimly aware of teeth grazing gently across his skin as the snake reaches its destination, and now, up close, Gunnar can smell its breath. It reminds him of something chemical... alcohol perhaps. He breathes in deeply, trying to recapture it, but all he gets is a lungful of smoke that finally sends him reeling, every muscle in his body turning to liquid underneath him.

And he hardly feels the sharp sting in his arm as the snake kisses him, nor the dull ache that follows as the numbness floods his veins. He’s falling forward through the smoke and the enveloping darkness, unaware before he hits the floor.

 

***

 

Gunnar fights his way up through the blackness, head swimming as his body slides towards consciousness. He can hear someone calling his name through the haze.  


“Gunnar?” 

He feels like he should know the voice but he can’t remember where he is.

“Hey, Gunnar…”

He can’t seem to make his body respond to his urges to move and he struggles to say something, but he can’t get it together to make any noise either. Suddenly he feels the pain behind his eyes, in his head and hands.

“Hey, it’s okay, you’re alright... you’re alright.”

He can feel strong arms around him, pulling him over on to his back. He winces as hands touch his body, his face, fingers brushing his fringe off his eyelids.

“Come on, Gunnar, say something. Can you hear me?”

Then he feels hands on his shoulders, semi-rough shaking and a more urgent tone of voice: “Gunnar, can you hear me? Wake up!” 

He finally registers reality, remembering dazedly... that fucking thug cracking him, and Vilain, and the blinding flash. How long ago did all of that happen?

“Barney?” Gunnar manages, opening his eyes. But it’s not his lover leaning over him.

“Not quite, buddy,” Hale replies quickly, relief colouring his words. 

The hands on his shoulders slide around him, trying to get him up into a half-sitting position. Gunnar can’t get his body to work properly and help him, offering dead weight to his teammate instead. 

“We have to get out of here! You gotta be able to get up.” Caesar reaches one hand up to Gunnar’s face, fingers pushing back his hair and cautiously exposing the tender flesh of his injured forehead. Gunnar involuntarily jerks his head away from the touch as it sends a jag of pain through the confusion clouding his mind. 

“What the fuck hit you?” Caesar murmurs, pulling his hand away quickly, but not before Gunnar sees his own blood wet on his fingers. It churns his stomach, forcing him to close his eyes against the image; he can already feel his body sinking back into the darkness.

 

Opening his eyes again, Gunnar had to swallow an expletive, borne more from shock than anything as he found himself staring at the dirty white artex of his bedroom ceiling, illuminated by the bare bulb of the lamp on Barney’s side of the bed. He could feel the cold damp of sweat on the pillow behind his head and his legs were tangled hopelessly in the thin bed sheets.

 _Fuck_ , that had seemed so real. He could smell the copper of his blood, the acrid smoke from the flash grenade – every single detail. He shivered involuntarily, despite the fact that the room was hot and airless. He could vaguely remember dreaming about something else as well, but that was hazy, eclipsed by the reminder of how close he’d come to checking out in that basement.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Barney was sleeping next to him, his breathing deep and even – medicated – and Gunnar moved carefully to avoid disturbing him. He disentangled himself from the sheets and got himself up and out into the darkened lounge, pulling the door ajar behind him and flipping on the light so he could look for cigarettes amongst the crap on the table.

He couldn’t put his finger on why, but the disturbing feeling from the dream was clinging coldly to his skin. The strange mix of reality and fiction in it made it feel like memory coming back to him, his brain filling in gaps of things he had forgotten or that his consciousness had skipped; of course, he knew that it was Caesar who had picked him up and dragged him out of that warehouse - _was_ it a real memory? 

Gunnar located a loose cigarette under a pile of local papers and junk mail, thankful that his lazy habit of shaking them all out of the pack so he could just grab one up on his way out of the house meant that there were always several scattered on the side. The act of lighting it and inhaling flooded him with a feeling of familiarity and routine, and he relaxed a little bit, shrugging off some of the coldness of the dream as the warm smoke replaced it.

Tomorrow it would be four days since the mission blew up, and it seemed like they were all stuck hanging in dead air. No one was making a move, and Gunnar could only assume that everyone had gone to ground, licking their wounds. The Expendables certainly had, and when Christmas had gone back to surveil the clean-up of the warehouse he hadn’t seen Vilain among the bodies the emergency recovery had brought out, so that meant the slippery bastard was hiding somewhere too. Maybe Hector was with him, maybe not; Lee reckoned he’d seen two or three burned guys put into body bags who had the right height and build to have been him. Vilain’s team was four men poorer now, whatever, and Gunnar could only imagine the fury he must be nursing about it. It made sense that he would be underground, regrouping.

Nothing was explaining the radio-silence from Church, though. If what he and Barney suspected was true – that the crooked spook was trying to set them _all_ up – then surely tying off all the loose ends should have been a priority for him? He should have had men out and on top of them by now. Perhaps they were wrong about him, or maybe Church was holding off to see if one set of pawns would still finish the other off for him? That was a risky strategy when they could both turn around and bite _him_.

Gunnar exhaled in a half-snort that didn’t make it to a laugh, smoke stuttering up in front of him. No, Church was clever. The risk was on them; without knowing for _certain_ that it was a set-up, that he’d orchestrated this job specifically to get Vilain’s weapons for himself and erase both groups of troublesome mercs, who would dare to make a move on him? Even the Expendables weren’t foolhardy enough to provoke him without being damn sure he was screwing them. Vilena was a special case, and ultimately it was only Church’s wallet that Barney had wounded on that one. Well, at least he knew that the Expendables didn’t generally just sit back and let themselves get used... Gunnar frowned. But if anything, that just made it even stranger that they were all still alive right now.

He shook his head and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray on the kitchen counter. The more he thought about all of this, the less sense it made. Every explanation seemed to ring about as true as the local headline reporting the ‘Tragic Gas Main Explosion!’ at the old DriCo factory units. 

“Wouldn’t some of those drugstore patches be more convenient?”

Gunnar was startled by Barney’s quiet voice, turning quickly to see him in the bedroom doorway, leaning against the frame on his good shoulder. “Huh?”

“Getting up in the middle of the night to smoke – I think they got twelve hour release shit for that.”

Gunnar wasn’t sure if he was teasing him or not; the last few days hadn’t exactly seen either of them in the mood for humour, but this could have been deadpan Barney coming back… “Sorry,” he tried. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“I was disturbed anyway,” Barney answered tiredly. “The fucking pain pills wear off too quick, I roll over – boom.” He gestured to the bandage on his arm. “Too old for this. You got one for me?”

“Yeah.” Gunnar picked up another loose cigarette and the lighter and walked across the room, holding them out as he got close. Barney took the smoke but not the light, putting it in his mouth and waiting for Gunnar to do the honours. It reminded him uncomfortably of field hospitals and lighting the last cigarette of guys who couldn’t move their arms… or didn’t even have them to move anymore. He shuddered and hoped that Barney hadn’t seen it, stepping back the second the tobacco caught and looking away to avoid the first breath drifting into his eyes.

Barney watched him for a moment, and Gunnar could feel his gaze trying to search out something on his face. Then he spoke, quiet again. “Gunnar, why are you really out here?” 

“It’s… no good reason.” He shrugged. “I woke up from a weird dream about the warehouse, that’s all.”

“A nightmare?”

“No, it wasn’t horrible, or frightening; it was just… odd. For a moment I couldn’t tell if it was real or not.” He paused. “Actually, I kind of still can’t.”

Barney’s forehead crinkled. “What?”

“I mean that it felt like it could have been a memory of something that actually happened, coming back, not just a dream. You ever get that? It creeps me out that your mind can do that to you.”

“What was it a memory of?”

“Down in the basement, between the flash grenade and Caesar getting me out of there. I thought I had nothing from the time it went off to coming around in that access tunnel. But I dreamt that I was on the ground right where I fell – Hale looking over me – for a moment I thought he was you… And Vilain was just gone, like he ghosted into the air.”

Barney took another pull on the cigarette, expression inscrutable, but Gunnar felt his reaction; knew he wasn’t getting it.

“That doesn’t sound _so_ strange.”

“I know.” Gunnar ran his hand roughly over his face. Perhaps he should have said it was a nightmare; paradoxically that would have sounded more sane. “It’s just… the idea that things can happen, and you black out on them and then you can’t be sure if they’re real or not; if they actually happened or not. That fuckin’ freaks me out, Barney.” Something in his voice must have backed up the words, because Barney’s eyes did cloud then, feeling showing on his face.

“Okay, then you have to believe that it’s just a dream, Gunnar. Your mind can play dirty tricks – it’s shitty, but that’s all they are… You start questioning that stuff and it’s the way madness lies.” He held up his spent cigarette. “Will you put this out for me and come back to bed? It’s going to be dawn soon.”

Gunnar nodded, mechanically reaching forward to take the filter end. Barney was pragmatic; that was his strength. Even if Gunnar didn’t feel like he could trust his own judgement, he’d always been pretty good at talking himself into believing in Barney’s. Maybe he could rely on it this time, too.

 

Emptying out the ashtray into the trash, he glanced through the blinds behind the sink and into the darkened road. The moon was nowhere to be seen and the light in the room reflected his own face back to him. He wondered if the darkest hour really was just before the dawn. He wondered if Barney had consciously echoed the saying. He wondered if everything _was_ going to seem clearer in the light. 

He wondered what the fuck they were going to do if it didn’t.

 

***


	6. I see the buildings crumble, see the empires fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the morning the blurred lines between fiction and reality, fantasy and memory, aren't getting any easier for Gunnar to negotiate.
> 
>  
> 
> **This part includes swearing, and brief mentions of injuries and drug withdrawal.**
> 
>  
> 
> Content Note: (Consensual) somnophilia/sleepy sex.

This time, Gunnar _knew_ he was dreaming. His mind hovered halfway between the morning and heavy drifting sleep, lucid enough to be aware of the pillow against his face and Barney’s thigh pressed against his own, but too far gone to move a muscle, breath and body entirely disconnected from any conscious influence he could exert.

He was in the backroom of a bar, dim and smoky, hot as hell and close with it; he didn’t know the place, but he’d been in hundreds like it. Voices murmured low around him and he caught snatches of their intimate conversations, stifled moans and laboured breathing – heavy accents, foreign language, dirty words… Barney shifted slightly at his side and Gunnar felt a hand splay on his chest; he turned to see who was making the advance, and met the confident eyes of a young guy with a good physique and some fearsome jewellery in his face and ears. Gunnar smiled and shook his head ‘no’ – too young – and the guy melted away back to the bar. Somewhere in here would be someone who fit the bill; someone he could have his own intimate conversation with in a dark corner. His dick already felt half-hard, and he squeezed it through the thick leather of his pants, letting the outline show for anyone who wanted to look.

He scanned the men around him for the kind of build he liked – compact, muscular and tight. One man was drawing his eye even turned away from him, and Gunnar moved to get closer; he was shirtless as well, showing off a back-piece that looked like a dragon… no, a snake. It criss-crossed his spine and moved with his shoulder blades, and Gunnar wanted to reach out and touch it, to trace it with his fingers. Instead, he leant in towards the man’s neck and spoke low, inviting him to turn around and check him out.

When he did, he was as handsome as he was fit, his blue-grey eyes like sea or steel, and Gunnar wondered if that was why he didn’t feel guilty about using his dreams like this; fantasy conjured perfection, with no relation to real life. There was no threat to his real relationship – this was just his mind messing around in this twilight playground between sleep and daydream. The man was already palming his dick through the leather, and Gunnar found himself really wanting to know how those sharp cheeks would feel hollowing around it, sucking him in. He heard himself moan a little as his answer came, sound vibrating deep in his throat and fingers twitching over his hipbone.

The bar slipped away from around them, unimportant for the consummation of the hook-up, and Gunnar focussed on the building sensation of heat and pleasure sparking from this guy’s lips around his cock. Eyes closed, he felt fingers brush against his own at his hip, pushing them gently out of the way. Then the lips disappeared, replaced by a slow and steady hand. Breath hitching, Gunnar pressed up into the grip, firmer than the blowjob and even more satisfying.

When he looked down again, the man on his knees in front of him was biting his lip and stroking his own chest with his free hand, face flushed; those eyes – almost hypnotic in their intensity – sought and held Gunnar’s gaze, like he was seeing right through him into the increasing haze of arousal and urgency that was taking over his mind. He looked as though he was getting off on the sight of him losing control, and that was exactly what Gunnar liked; the complementary action/reaction that made these transactions so satiating, so neat. For every action, there is an equal and opposite…

He heard his own voice murmur again, indistinct sounds of pleasure, and felt himself shift on the mattress; a half-realised movement from a half-conscious impulse. Heat bloomed on his skin and pooled in his stomach, and he reached to touch that cut-glass jaw, his rough palm tilting up the man’s neck and slipping in his sweat. The horned tattoo over his jugular stood out dark and unmistakeable, and Gunnar’s drowsy mind couldn’t deny any longer who this fantasy was drawing on. Vilain’s lips were parted, that magnetic gaze so damn compelling, and the steady rhythm of his hand on Gunnar’s cock was pulling him closer and closer to the edge. He felt his body shudder and tense; this shouldn’t be something he wanted, but it was somehow everything his body craved, the only thing his mind could focus on.

He heard a groan die on his lips, _thank god not a name_ , and his hips jerked hard as he came, the rush of pleasure sweeping through him like a wave breaking. It was a wave that swept Vilain away with it, reality sliding in to replace him with the sunlit bedroom and the shock of realising that he’d just come for real. Barney’s hand was still stroking lazily over his cock, his fingers warm and slick, and when Gunnar leaned up to look at him he was greeted with a wry smile.

“Hope you were dreaming about me.”

“I…” He didn’t know what to say, but Barney cut him off anyway.

“Shh – I’m not bein’ serious. Long time since we last did _that_ , huh?”

“Yeah.” Gunnar rubbed his face and pushed back his hair, shaking off the afterglow that made him want to close his eyes and lay his head back down. They’d been crazy opportunist with each other like this in the early months of their relationship, having worked out boundaries that didn’t leave a lot beyond them. It would have been entirely born of a joke about not letting a single hard-on go by at their age, had waking up to someone’s mouth or hands not been something that got them both more than a little buzzed. This hadn’t exactly been the greatest timing, though. “Your arm…” Gunnar started.

“This one doesn’t hurt,” Barney told him, flexing his fingers where they cupped Gunnar’s softening cock. “And if I can shoot a bullseye with both hands, I think I can manage with dick, right?” He was smiling again, but Gunnar couldn’t laugh at the joke. Barney was getting back to himself, to _them_ – getting on with things in the same way as before the mission – and that realisation made Gunnar feel sick inside, because Barney didn’t know what he knew… Barney didn’t know how he’d failed him so badly back in that ambush, or that he’d lied about the interrogation, or that he might have got some kind of background that he couldn’t even remember with Vilain… Shit, he’d just come in Barney’s hand dreaming it _was_ Vilain, for Christ’s sake!

“I’ve got to take a shower,” he mumbled suddenly, pulling away from the tangle of limbs and sheets that was holding them together and turning quickly from Barney’s confused stare in case the nausea showed on his face. Now his mind was switched on again, he couldn’t believe he’d let Barney get back so close to him. How could he have been letting his injured lover anywhere near his sick skin? He stood up fast, eyes searching the room for a discarded towel, and when he bent down to pick it up the stitches at his forehead throbbed with the pressure and made him hiss.

“Hey,” Barney said, concerned. “What’s the matter all of a sudden? Was it this?” He touched the space on the bed where Gunnar had just been. “I’m sorry… I thought you were okay with that.”

“It’s not that,” he replied. “Don’t worry about that.” Gunnar held his hand to his forehead and checked it for blood. No, the stitches were intact.

“Then what? Is your head okay?”

_Good question._

“I just need a shower,” he answered, moving towards the bathroom door.

“Wait!” Something in Barney’s tone stopped him before he could go in. He felt like banging his broken forehead against it instead, but he turned to face his lover again.

Barney cleared his throat a little before speaking, although his voice still came out as rough and low as ever. “Gunnar… I mean… have we got a problem now? Between us, that is? Because ever since the mission blew-up, I keep feeling you flinch away from me.” He paused, and Gunnar knew he was waiting for some kind of acknowledgement. “Gunnar? I don’t understand. Is it this?” Barney indicated his arm, and the swelling and bruises on his face. “I know it ain’t pretty, and I know we both probably got some guilt rattling around inside about how we couldn’t do jack shit to prevent what happened to each other in that warehouse, but… you’ve seen me injured before. Fuck, I watched _you_ shake and puke your bodyweight in brown tar out all over this bed for days.” Barney stopped again, and Gunnar could feel the tension radiating off him. He _wanted_ to say something to help him understand; hell, part of him wanted to get back across to that mattress and grab hold of Barney right then, to try and reassure him that the problem wasn’t with them – it was _him_ , and his crazy thinking, and that _bastard_ Vilain. But all he could do was close his eyes and bite back his shame.

“Can’t you even look at me now? Jesus Christ, Gunnar, I…” Barney took a sudden, shuddering breath, his sentence cut off for it, and Gunnar’s eyes snapped open straight to his face.

“Barney?”

“Yeah.” His voice was quiet, coming out with pain layered in it.

“I know – I _know_ , okay.”

“Then…?” Barney looked perplexed, and Gunnar felt even worse, watching him move to lie back slowly and draw the back of his forearm across his eyes.

And he wondered if this was what it was like for Barney when he’d been the one watching _him_ crumbling onto that mattress; seeing someone who you knew as so strong seem so crushed, thinking that your presence was as much of a hindrance to them as a help… feeling help _less_.

Neither of them spoke or moved for a moment, until Barney took another deep breath and sat back up. “Gunnar, I’m going to get up and go over to the hangar. I need some stuff from there, and I need to pick up working again. Maybe it’s even best if I stay there for a while – my arm’s getting easier now.”

Gunnar nodded mutely, actually grateful that he’d suggested it, and went into the bathroom fast before Barney could see him start to shake.

When he came out, he was on his own. 

 

***

 

Hours later, Gunnar was beginning to think he needed to get out himself and do something – anything – that would effectively consume his brain; bills and books weren’t cutting it, but maybe taking the bike apart piece by piece in the fresh air would do it? Or he could turn out all the broken kit in the cabinets in the garage below the apartment. _Shit’s been building up for months._

Suddenly, his ears picked up on a tiny noise, a sound not quite usual enough to blend in amongst all the other little sounds in the building and go unnoticed. It was movement – the whisper and shift of weight and clothing that gave away an unseen approach. Gunnar’s attention whipped around to the front door and he was on his feet and grabbing out his pistol in a split second. It wasn’t someone coming in… not yet, at least.

 _Fuck_ , was this the house call he’d been desperately hoping wouldn’t happen? A ‘friendly’ follow-up from Vilain, set in motion by that stupid mistake with the truck back at the warehouse? Or was it Church’s hit squad, finally here to thin out the congregation? Gunnar’s free hand moved to the phone in his pocket, uncertain whether to push the panic button or not; he needed to be sure before he alerted the rest of the Expendables. A noise could be just a noise, however much it was tripping his paranoia switch. He felt relieved that Barney wasn’t still here, though. Two against… however many… was better than one, but Barney was already injured; he didn’t need an unplanned-for fight.

Backed up to the wall by the front door, Gunnar listened for evidence that someone was on the other side of it doing exactly the same. The door was chained and bolted as well as locked – whoever was there would need to shoot and ram it to get through. He couldn’t hear a damn thing out there now! There was nothing from the roof, either; the point of entry he’d expect a tactical team to take – cut the iron cage over the skylight and smash straight down into the bathroom. Gunnar kept one eye on the bedroom door just in case.

The only other windows were accessible up sheer walls, since the apartment was above the workshop-garage, wooden stairs up the side to get to the front door. He hadn’t heard footsteps coming up or down them… Shit, was he going completely loco here? _Something_ had been moving around. It wasn’t someone casual, like leaflet droppers or the fucking Girl Scouts coming to the door – it was someone taking care not to be heard.

 _Stealth bullshit._ It was just the kind of thing Gunnar hated. You wanted to off someone? Fuck doing it ninja-style! Snipe them through the window from four blocks away; bang the door down and toss a bomb in there – don’t pussyfoot around the place like you don’t exist.

He thought about getting away from the door again, gambling that a careful look through one of the windows would show him whether he was surrounded or not. Whoever this was must have heard _him_ moving about; if they knew that the element of surprise was long gone, what were they waiting for? Him to roll out the red carpet?

Gunnar dropped low to the ground and scrambled back across the open kitchen-living room, skirting his furniture and watching the windows. He was half expecting a gas grenade to come through one of them… then the fun would really start. He mentally ran through what weapons he had cached in the bedroom; there were better ones down in the workshop beneath him, but getting to them meant getting outside and then in through the bottom doors. _Pity_. There was ammo in a box under the bed, a rifle, a vest… What else? Gunbelt on the chair, but he already had the pistol out of it in his hand; the knife would be there though, and another one taped behind the headboard – a relic from times past when he’d been relaxed enough to bring strangers home with him, but not _that_ relaxed.

There was sudden traffic noise from the street outside and Gunnar stopped still and tuned in. More people coming? No, a vehicle going past… but that was a bike ignition firing underneath it – someone using the traffic to cover themselves. Did that mean this ghost was punching out?

Okay, now his heart was pounding! He was straight up on his feet and over to the window, certain enough that it wasn’t a risk anymore and straining for the smell of petrol or smoke. More likely he had a timer counting down on him, the biker waiting until he was a certain distance away before detonating whatever he’d planted. The road looked deserted in both directions, and Gunnar knew he had to get out of there - _now_.

He slipped into autopilot, calculating his escape routes like he’d calculate an equation. The front door had to be rigged; that’s why he’d heard the noise in the first place. He wanted to be breaking out at the back of the apartment, getting distance in the direction of the neighbouring goods yard. The bedroom window gave him a drop onto concrete – it would have to do.

 _Shit_ , there was some stuff in here that he didn’t really want to lose, but he could hardly say that he hadn’t suspected this was coming. Anything sentimental that went up in flames was on him for not listening to his gut instincts and clearing everything out of this building straight after the mission tanked.

He was in the bedroom now, ready to bust the locked window through; it would be faster than fucking with the keys and squeezing out of the open tilt. He looked to the bedside to grab the heavy night-table to ram it ahead of him. Jesus, this had to be cutting it fine!

_Wait! What the fuck?!_

As he picked up the small cabinet, Gunnar caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye – crisp folded paper on the pillow next to it. It stopped him in his tracks and he wavered with the table in his arms. Neat cursive hand in stark black ink stood out on the note: ‘Gunnar Jensen’.

 _What?_ Did he…? Did he stop what he was doing and pick it up? Had this all just turned into some kind of game?

He dropped the cabinet abruptly and took hold of the pistol from his waistband again, back on the alert for any noise in the apartment. Stepping cautiously around towards the bathroom door, he pushed it open and glanced in – the skylight was open, the security grid flipped back. _Motherfucking…_ He must be really losing it! This apartment was two and a half rooms big and he’d been listening for every little sound.

Okay, so while he was by the front door, someone was playing ‘love letters for my lady’ in the back? That wasn’t Church; not even close. It could only be Vilain. Gunnar walked back over to the bed and reached for the note, urgency dissipated from his movements now. The place wasn’t going to blow, not yet at any rate: he was meant to read this… 

‘Gunnar Jensen’

He turned it over in his hands. The paper was quality, expensive, unfolding at precise angles.

‘Don’t worry, your place is safe… at least from me. But I think that now we have a common interest in pursuing the man who would set our groups against each other. Are you feeling sacrilegious? Then meet with me.’

There was a number neatly copied underneath. A cell phone, Gunnar supposed, sim traceable to a random name at a non-address. Beneath again, more words:

‘And do you remember me, now? You’ve had a little time to think about it… I hope so, but if not – what is it they say? – _we’ll always have Paris_. You still look good in leather.’

It was signed with a flourish, but Gunnar’s eyes weren’t seeing the paper any more, his mind blurring into disbelief. No, he _was_ going crazy… Or was he still dreaming? His brain _couldn’t_ be playing these games with him! He consciously forced himself not to crush or tear the paper; confirming its reality really was an act of insanity. Instead he folded it again, as precisely and carefully as its author had done, and set it face down on the fallen cabinet before stepping away. 

Vilain had been here. In his bedroom – in the room he shared with Barney! And Vilain had got inside his head, and inside more besides…

Yes, he remembered Paris.

 

***


	7. Out there the snipers work the ridges, building bombs and blowing bridges

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now Gunnar has to decide what to do in response to Vilain's note. He should probably tell the other Expendables, really... That would be the best course of action, wouldn't it?
> 
> Oh well! XD
> 
>  
> 
> **This part includes swearing, gunplay and references to drug use.**

In the time between first reading Vilain’s note, and making the call it invited, Gunnar had spun his mind in circles a hundred times. He knew what he _should_ do – go straight to Barney at the hangar, or to Tool’s, or get someone else to come over to him and just show them the goddamn thing. He should have been letting anyone besides himself work out what to do next. But it wasn’t that easy.

_‘do you remember me, now?’_

_‘we’ll always have Paris’_

Sharing the note with Barney and the rest of the Expendables meant sharing what he’d so far kept completely out of all the conversations and questions about the warehouse mission. It would mean explaining to them what he could hardly explain in his own head; that he’d already crossed paths with Jean Vilain, and in the kind of circumstances that summed up exactly why Tool and Christmas had urged Barney to think twice about making him a permanent member of the team in the first place, too. That was when their collective counsel still might have had the power to overwhelm Barney’s apparent blind-spot where so many of Gunnar’s failings were concerned; back before personal feelings and messy, heated things like attraction and sex had even begun to complicate the working relationship between the pair of them.

Gunnar had met Vilain as a stranger. That was the unbelievable part of this story! It was an insane coincidence that had reared back around to haunt him now. Two men coming together in a seething backroom; just two anonymous bodies in a hook-up that he hadn’t even remembered afterwards, because he’d been high and horny and only really half there… all those ‘h’ words that seemed to get him into trouble time and time again. And that was all it was - all it had been. At least, as far as he could work it out today, close on five years later.

Gunnar cursed his inability to recall more than flashes of the nights he’d spent in Paris; he’d never thought he’d need to, and he’d let whole swathes of his life slip away into a blur. He’d allowed himself to exist for a long time within an endless cycle of flying to far-off places, fighting people and then forgetting about them, letting everything melt into a haze that was only occasionally punctuated by a defiant memory of a specific battlefield or hospital bed. Beyond that, he’d amassed nothing until he’d finally sobered up and actually started paying attention to his own life again. By that time, Barney was somehow already part of the ride, and – if Gunnar was really, truly honest with himself – that had been as strong a motivation for sorting out his shit back then as it was for hiding it from him now. 

Since his recollection of Vilain had begun creeping back, Gunnar had started to wonder how long Vilain had known about _him_. Were the Expendables on his radar before Church had contracted him to get rid of them? Had he recognised Gunnar straight away? Church had given them a dossier on Vilain and the Sangs that included surveillance, background, career histories… Gunnar didn’t doubt now that he’d provided the same to Vilain about them. So had he seen a picture and realised with a jolt that he was looking at a face he’d fucked, or did it come more slowly, sliding back to him piece by piece like it was for Gunnar?

 _Jesus Christ_ , he wished to hell that his whacked-out, forgotten self had made some kind of different choice on whatever night it was that had sparked all this insanity; that he’d picked a different club or approached a different man, and then none of it would’ve mattered anyway! But he hadn’t, and it _did_ , and maybe the reality was that he’d just been damn lucky so far in how little his past behaviour had caught up with him. 

It had always been Gunnar’s style to go A.W.O.L. in between jobs, taking the paycheck and disappearing into the underground of drugs and clubs and passing anonymity that would eventually become his hideout for more than just the downtime. He kept his stories vague when any of the others asked about it, and in return no one paid any hard attention until he started skipping jobs altogether. Tool had joked early on that Gunnar struck him as a textbook hedonist, and that it was easy to see why he’d moved into ‘freelance’ military. He was still smiling as he’d added – right in front of Gunnar – that putting him on the team would blow up in Barney’s face. And they’d all come to know that Tool was rarely wrong about anything… but Barney, with a personal compulsion that seemed to draw him straight to all the strays and second-chancers in the world, was apparently already hooked.

Phone in hand, that last thought was all Gunnar needed to convince himself not to dial Barney’s number, or Tool’s, or any other of the guys. They’d put up with his erratic shit for as long as they could, and they’d given him his _third_ chance at forging something meaningful out of his life after he’d cleaned up and made amends for dealing with Munroe and fighting Yang. They weren’t part of whatever game Vilain wanted to play with him now, and Gunnar had no desire to bring them into it and test their capacity to be understanding of him any more than he already had… And Barney? Well, this morning had amply demonstrated that the further away from Gunnar he was at the moment, the better for both of them, as if Gunnar’s failures at the warehouse hadn’t already underlined that enough!

His fingers punched in the number from the note instead, and Vilain’s curt, business-like response was to give him an address and a time before abruptly hanging up. It left Gunnar staring at the handset, wondering what the hell more he should have expected from the interaction. Some kind of conversation? Never talk over the phone was rule number one in the ‘are you being watched?’ checklist, but it still felt odd to hear Vilain’s voice stripped of all his theatrics. Gunnar had been hoping to hear something – fuck knows what – that would have given him a handle on what was going on here, but Vilain gave absolutely nothing away… Once more, all Gunnar was left with were questions hanging in the air. Was Vilain sincere about teaming up against Church? Or was this as much a trap as the warehouse had been? Was going to this meeting an even worse mistake than the ones he had already made?

At this point, distanced from the rest of the Expendables by his own design, Gunnar considered that at least he didn’t have a lot to lose by finding out.

 

*** 

 

Riding through the city at night was something Gunnar was well-familiar with, but it felt unusual not to have Barney’s taillight up ahead or the other Expendables rolling beside him. As far as most people who saw them – at the parlour, the Old Point bar, or together on the road – were concerned, that was who they were: ageing bikers who were around off and on, apparently unconnected to anyone or anything except each other. It wasn’t so far from the truth, he supposed, and their connections to each other were complex enough by themselves.

He’d debated for a long time over whether to leave some sort of record about this rendezvous that Barney would find if the worst happened and he didn’t come back from it; if he just disappeared, it would look like he’d pulled a cut and run on their relationship, and Gunnar couldn’t bring himself to let Barney think that. Maybe they weren’t going to make it anyway, but whatever happened deserved more than a confused conclusion. In the end Gunnar had scrawled his own note with the location and the words _‘in case this was the road to hell’_ , and left it on Barney’s side of the bed. Echoing Vilain’s technique felt strange yet somehow obvious, and even if Barney could do nothing with the information, at least he would know that Gunnar had been acting with good intentions. 

A few minutes more along the roads by the industrial riverside, and he was coming up on the address Vilain had given. It didn’t look appealing. Approaching slowly, he killed the engine and coasted off the road into the rough ground. A building had once stood here, but only the lines of its foundations were evident now, scarring the ground in a different colour to the rest of the dirt. Gunnar had never been by when it was standing, and he wondered what it had been. New Orleans was his home now, but he didn’t have a history with it – it was just a base selected by Tool and gravitated towards by the others over years gone past – Gunnar had no mental map of how things used to be. His maps were of European cities, scattered slices of Indochina, the bits of L.A. that tourists didn’t visit… Maybe after whatever was going to happen with Church and this fucked-up mission had played out, it would be the right time to reacquaint himself with one of them? _Assuming I don’t end up dead, that is_ , he thought darkly.

The silence left in the wake of the motorcycle engine gave away nothing useful. There was water nearby, and the traffic back on the busier roads behind him, but no human sounds aside from his own bootsteps as he touched his feet down and stepped over and off the bike. He glanced around him, marking the position of the few objects surrounding the plot; there was a decaying perimeter fence at the back of it, the scrubland beyond leading down towards the river, and the bare and windowless wall of the building to which this one would have been attached if it was still standing. It cast a dark shadow over the left-hand ground, and a haphazard pile of rubble to the right completed the scene. Why the hell Vilain had chosen here to meet was anybody’s guess… Because it was practically deserted? So were a lot of places, and some of them were even buildings with rooms and lights and tables, and other things Gunnar would have appreciated more than yet another wedge of industrial waste ground. 

“I’m here. I’m unarmed,” he called out. He held his hands in front of him, showing them empty and turning in the space so that the gesture could be seen from all angles. The move was a pretence, because he was pretty confident he already knew where Vilain was; there were only a couple of places anyone worth their salt would choose as a vantage point here, and Vilain was no amateur. For a few seconds, he held his breath and waited, facing in the direction he guessed the man to be and anticipating a shot just in case it came. He didn’t think Vilain would have bothered to lure him here just to pick him off straight away, but it was one possibility amongst many nevertheless.

“I’m not going to shoot.” Vilain’s voice was quiet behind him, and Gunnar startled up like an animal, cursing loud. 

_Of course_ Vilain was anywhere but the place he’d expected. _Of course_ he was within touching distance before Gunnar could even blink. _Of course, of course, of course._

Gunnar curled his lip as he turned, not caring to hide the anger he dispensed in equal measure at both himself and Vilain. Either he really _was_ getting too old and slow for this, or Vilain was uncannily good at predicting his actions, his thought process, his reactions… It made him feel naked in the face of him, which was apt, given yesterday’s early morning dream. 

“What is it you want from me?” he gritted out, voice tight. “Why do you want _me_ here? Me, out of any of us?” 

“Why do you think?” Vilain’s reply was even and calm; infuriatingly, provocatively so.

 _Why did he think?_ Gunnar _didn’t want_ to think about it. He didn’t want to admit that he was the weak link in the Expendables’ roll call – as demonstrated in Vilena, he was the obvious target for anyone looking to turn someone inside. “I’m not gonna sell out my friends for you!”

Vilain’s eyebrow raised. “You think Church is your friend?”

“What?” Gunnar let the confusion show on his face, and for a brief second Vilain’s expression seemed to reflect it back to him, before smoothing out again as something aligned for him.

“No, you don’t… It’s me you’re not clear about.” He gave a slight shake of his head. “The human mind is a marvellous thing, Gunnar Jensen. All that education, but your emotions overwhelm it like *that*.” He snapped his fingers. 

Gunnar eyed him uncertainly. Where was this going?

“You read the note,” Vilain continued. “You already _know_ why I want to talk, but you’re assuming there must be something else – another angle – because why else would someone like me be interested in you if not to try and play your loyalty to your team off for something cheap? Is that what you think?”

“Let’s just say that I don’t buy your intentions as even remotely honourable,” Gunnar growled. “So both our teams are running from Church now? So what? It doesn’t change the fact that you were ready to destroy us before those tables turned. I say you still are. For all I know this is just another sham and you’re _still with_ Church!” 

“You’re welcome to labour under that misapprehension for now if you want, of course, but give me time and I’ll prove where I stand with Church,” Vilain answered tartly. “Who knows you’re here?”

“Ross,” Gunnar lied.

Vilain laughed, and it made Gunnar want to curl his fingers around the man’s throat. “You shouldn’t do things like this alone. It might give someone the… _wrong impression_.”

“Well, maybe I’ve always just been careless like that,” Gunnar spat back.

“That’s one word for it. Come with me somewhere.”

 _Yeah, right._ “Where?”

Vilain smiled and shook his head. “And say it out loud when anyone could be listening?”

“I thought you’d decided I was on my own?”

He didn’t make an answer to that, and Gunnar allowed himself the slightest feeling of satisfaction at silencing him, in spite of the alternative possibility that the ‘anyone’ Vilain was referring to actually meant Church or his cronies at the C.I.A.

“And if you wanted to take me somewhere else, why even meet here at all?” It was a question partly for the sake of questioning, since really it made sense for them to keep moving, but Vilain’s response took it in another direction that Gunnar didn’t expect at all.

“I wanted to see you in open ground,” he answered simply. “So far we’ve always met in close spaces. It doesn’t suit you. I wanted to see how you move when the walls come down.”

Gunnar fixed him with a frown. “We’re standing still, talking.”

“And it’s enough.” Vilain’s eyes broke the fix and swept pointedly up and down Gunnar’s body. “I wonder if you even know where your own strength lies?”

_Forty years of Kyokushin, twenty in the military, fifteen mercenary… I think I figured it out okay, asshole._

There was silence between them for a moment, as if Vilain was giving him time to ruminate on the question, but Gunnar merely waited him out, irritated by his ridiculous rhetoric. Vilain’s gaze had settled on his chest, apparently distracted somewhere around his heart, and Gunnar wondered if _he_ was thinking of Paris now… _That would be so--_

Suddenly he saw Vilain’s eyes flare wide and his weight start to shift as lightning quick as he’d moved in the warehouse, and Gunnar knew instinctively in that split-second that a laser sight had popped up on him.

 _Stupid fucking bastard!_ his mind screamed, and then he was crashing onto his back, the bullet shrilling over them and hitting the bike with a metallic crack. He didn’t have the time or breath to shout it out loud as they both scrambled up and around it to take what little cover the Harley afforded, but his brain was repeating it over and over. _Stupid bastard. Stupid fucking…_ Him or Vilain, it didn’t matter which one of them had been followed, because they weren’t getting out of this in any way other than by the skin of their teeth!

Vilain was drawing his gun, rapidly scanning the roof of the building across from them, and Gunnar yanked his arm to aim in the direction of the street. “The corner! Ground level!” he snarled. He couldn’t see the shooter, but that was the origin of the shot. Vilain squeezed the trigger, and the answering fire came back wide of the bike. Whoever was there was scrambling too, unable to reposition fast enough to take a better aim. “Again, come on!”

Gunnar had to trust Vilain to keep this guy pinned-down, and the irony that he was the man he probably trusted _least in the world_ right now wasn’t getting fucking lost on him. Yet somehow he was still doing it, and working fast to get his own gun out of the fairing storage.

“Just fire it up!” Vilain urged him. “We need to get out of here.”

He was right – they would be sitting ducks as soon as their ammo was out, and Gunnar could already hear sirens closing in. _Shit._ So now he didn’t have a choice about working together with Vilain, at least until they were back on safe ground… Gritting his teeth and hoping the cover fire was strong enough, he swung up and onto the Harley, gunning the engine within seconds. The resultant roar was loud enough to cover the echo of Vilain’s last shots, and as soon as Gunnar felt the weight and heat of his body slide in behind him, he was skidding them off the uneven plot and onto the hard tarmac of the road. 

And once that happened? _No one_ was catching them.

 

***


	8. They say the profit's high, but I know the cost is higher

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gunnar and Vilain make their escape, but it's looking increasingly like nothing good is going to come from this uneasy partnership... 
> 
>  
> 
> **This part includes swearing and brief violence (including facial injury).**

Gunnar was driving fast, and his anger tightened his grip on the accelerator, pushing the bike through corners more carelessly than was really sane with Vilain’s weight throwing out the back. He could feel the man’s arm crooking around his waist, his body hitting up against him; it was closer than Gunnar wanted to get, but that wasn’t exactly under his control any more. Any more? As if anything in his recent encounters with Vilain _had_ been! This man was too good at putting him out of control, manipulating him and sending his mind to places Gunnar didn’t want it to be. 

Vilain’s breath was hot on the nape of his neck, his sweat-damp shirt pressing against Gunnar’s back as he leant forward to shout in his ears. Gunnar couldn’t hear the words for the roar of the engine and the wind whipping them away, but he wouldn’t have listened even if he could – he was getting them out of here in any direction except back towards the fucking mess that had been his milieu for the last five days: the warehouse, the apartment, Tool’s garage, the rendezvous by the river, Barney… Gunnar wanted to get far away from all of it; he wanted to put distance between Vilain and all of it. This was a bomb waiting to go off. 

 

By the time Gunnar was finally prepared to pull over and call it far enough away to be safe, he’d put miles between them and the riverside. They were out on the open road, heading south west of the city and swiftly leaving the lights behind them. The swathes of buildings and parking on either side morphed into stretches of pitch darkness punctuated by various highway shit: a gas station, a motel, a roadside diner… Vilain had given up shouting at the back of Gunnar’s head a while ago, and his grip around him had loosened now the ride was smoother. Gunnar wondered what was going through his mind; what he was going to say to him when they stopped.

He rode a little longer, looking for a good place to leave the main road and finish this chase-that-never-was altogether. Gunnar was certain that no one had followed them this time; he’d got away too fast for anyone who was on that street to have caught up by tailing them, and he’d taken a route that was too haphazard and unpredictable to be easily picked-up on. Vilain could give him credit for _that_ strength if he wanted: Gunnar had always been adept at disappearing.

He knew from memory that there was a truck stop and bar coming up a bit further on from where they were – a useful landmark. Did Vilain know it, too? According to Church’s files Vilain moved around a lot, but he’d kept a significant on-going interest in the city in terms of property and return visits, and Gunnar thought that maybe he’d spent a fair amount of time here at some point. The information given on his past had been pretty patchy until he’d come up on government radars as an import/export specialist with a penchant for arms consignments, and although Gunnar now didn’t trust that half the details hadn’t been deliberately redacted, he could buy that a French speaker with contacts in the military would be drawn to the place.

The trucker bar wouldn’t be a bad location to end up, but Gunnar chose a turn before it came into view. Not being anywhere there were potential witnesses seemed like a good idea somehow.

“Why here?” Vilain asked once Gunnar had pulled in, some way down what looked like an access road into land running alongside the highway. His eyebrows were arched, but his expression was more intrigued than puzzled.

“Why not?” Gunnar replied shortly as they both got off the bike, the loss of the headlamp when he cut the engine leaving the moonlight as the only illumination, bright and eerie. “It’s as good a place as any for what I want to do.”

Vilain’s face did cloud then, and Gunnar smiled. If it had sounded like a threat, it _was_ , because his anger at what had happened back at the meet – in fact, at everything involving Vilain so far – had increased, not dissipated, with the journey. Gunnar was ready for a fight if that was what it was going to take to get some answers, and this time there wasn’t going to be a flash grenade to cut things short.

Okay, it was pretty obvious that it was Church who was responsible for whoever had been taking shots at them back on that plot; unless Vilain was going above and beyond to convince him that working together was a good idea, he wouldn’t have been hurling him out of the way of a bullet from his own men, or getting targeted himself. However, that didn’t mean that he and Gunnar were automatically on the level with each other now. 

“Are you going to try and kill me?” Vilain was keeping his tone matter-of-fact, conversational, but Gunnar could tell he was wary of what was happening. His body seemed on the alert, and his fingers were flexing minutely as though he was considering the weapons he could draw. Gunnar checked off what he likely had on him: the gun from back at the riverside, of course, with a little ammo; maybe another pistol somewhere on his body, definitely knives. He could see the outline of one blade taped or strapped to the outside of Vilain’s right thigh even through the heavy canvas of his pants, and the handle of another coming up from his right boot. That probably meant there was a better-concealed knife on his left side somewhere – the surprise package. Gunnar wasn’t going to get into a knife fight, though; that was stupid with Vilain. He wanted a fight that used words over weapons, at least to start with – carrying on the unfinished business from before the meeting went bust.

“Am I going to kill you?” Gunnar repeated Vilain’s question slowly back to him. “Right now that really depends on whether you can persuade me not to, because – yeah – I stopped the bike here with that in my mind… But another part of me wants to hear answers more, Vilain. I want to know exactly what the fuck is going on.” He took a step closer as he said it, and Vilain actually stepped back a pace, maintaining the distance between them.

 _Well, well._ That was a new reaction, and Gunnar briefly wondered what was different all of a sudden. Was Vilian hesitating at the sight of a little of his ‘crazy’ side? Was that something he wasn’t expecting? Gunnar could work with that; he didn’t have any problem with bringing it front and centre if that was what was going to press buttons.

“You know what I think is going on?” he continued, voice low, tone firm. “I think that you are a fucking little creep. You came into my apartment – into my _bedroom_. Were you watching me to check I was alone?” He started to pick it up a bit then, firing his questions in faster. “How long were you watching me beforehand? What else have you been watching? Do you really think I’m inclined to trust you when I know that you work like that – that _you_ work like that?”

“Jensen-- ”

Gunnar didn’t let him speak.

“Do you think that I’m impressed that you can recognise a fuck from five years ago and then bring it up in fancy ways when you meet him again? And do you really think that I would let my past impact on how I'm going to act now, when it’s life or death, when my team comes into it? Do you?” He ended his final question abruptly and waited, staring darkly at Vilain. 

“I…”

“This one is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

He watched Vilain flinch at that. Yeah, it was clear now: intimidating _him_ in an interrogation meant unravelling his sense of dominance; shaking his faith in his own ability to predict the person opposite him. Gunnar almost wanted to laugh. It was the textbook weakness of men who liked to give it out and had the style to do it, but no hard experience of the flipside; no military training, no SERE to fall back on.

 _Try predicting me now_ , Gunnar thought testily – _now, when you’re wondering if my head’s all here even once the drugs are out of it, when I’m not spinning with concussion, when I’m not scared for my partner’s life…_  


Vilain’s jaw clenched, and when he spoke again, his tone was definitely more brittle; its steadiness forced. “This is wasting time: we don’t have it. Every second we spend fighting each other is a second our enemies spend getting closer.”

“So what exactly are you suggesting we do?” Gunnar demanded.

“We calm down. We start thinking better and we make a plan!” Vilain sounded as tense as Gunnar had ever heard him, and he took perverse satisfaction from that.

“ _My_ plan is: I get back on this bike and leave you out here like the snake you are, you slimy, pathetic bastard.” Gunnar’s blood was getting up now, adrenaline curling his fingers up into his palm. “And yeah… maybe, just to be safe, I’d better put a bullet in your head before I go.”  


Vilain’s hand hovered tentatively beside his hip, weighing up his chances, and in that moment even Gunnar himself wasn’t sure whether he meant to follow through on that death threat or not. He was pretty sure he was going to do _something_ before this encounter ended. He felt like punching Vilain out; if he could get close enough he’d take choking him out. His sheer brute force was his advantage over this creep, and fuck was Gunnar itching to use it here. He could get hold of him by the neck and squeeze that tattoo on his throat until the skin burst red; stop his air, stop his blood – he could break his neck that way. Tension thrummed through Gunnar’s shoulders and arms; he was starting to feel like he could really lose it if he let himself. He could close the space towards Vilain in one stride, grab his face and…

“I said, calm down,” Vilain repeated suddenly. “Put your anger where it matters: towards Church, or whoever he’s paying now to do his dirty work.” Gunnar watched as he shook his head, eyes shutting tight for a second. “It’s not me. Maybe you don’t trust me, but it’s not me on his payroll anymore.”

“So you were before?” Gunnar spat. He didn’t really care now; it wasn’t like he didn’t know.

“It was a business deal – he wanted your team gone, cut off at the head.”

 _Cut off._ The proof Church wanted Barney dead. If this was Vilain's best attempt making him calmer, it was horribly misguided! That fucking deal had nearly succeeded: Vilain’s men had shot Barney; Hector had _tortured_ him.

“You’d have taken the money to kill me,” Vilain added. “Business. Sometimes you don’t know what will happen. It looked like easy cash; an easy job.”

Gunnar’s anger flared. “You _fucking_ … So easy, except _our_ team did its job! And our men are still alive – how many of yours?”

That stung hard, Gunnar could tell. Vilain’s already taut expression pulled even tighter, his eyes flashing. “Fuck _you_ ,” he growled. “Your knife man is lucky he’s not rotting in the ground.”

Christmas had killed Hector, then. Good.

“Yeah, I guess your deal with the devil didn’t work out,” Gunnar taunted him. “Incidentally, hardly a ringing endorsement to go into partnership with you against him!”

“Jensen, listen…”

“No. You listen to me: you’re the one who needs this team-up – you’re the one who’s weak and running.” Gunnar was back on a roll now, primed to take advantage of this newly-found power shift between them. “Where are your weapons? Up in smoke. Where are your men? I’d guess Hell. And – my god – you _have_ to know that you’re in a bad way when the person who you’re coming to for help is _me_.”

Gunnar could see this clearly – finally. He didn’t have to be here at all. Fuck Vilain and his game playing. All it had done was put them both in danger. _Fuck the past_ , and fuck what anybody thought if they knew about it. What he’d said in his crazy-bravado speech a minute ago? That Vilain was dreaming if he thought that Gunnar would let anything affect his professionalism now, or affect the strength of his team? He could say it all again for real because he fucking meant it! Church might be strong, but The Expendables weren’t weak. They could take him on themselves without Vilain’s involvement. “Our little dance is o--”

He was suddenly interrupted mid-sentence by the sound of his phone going off, the tone jarring and unexpected in the still night air around them. For a split-second, they both stood there like they’d never heard a phone before, but then Vilain opened his mouth to speak and Gunnar automatically held a hand up to stop him. Maybe this was perfect timing…

He slipped the phone out of his pocket quickly and registered the number on the display – it was one that Barney used. He could feel Vilain watching him uncertainly, and he deliberately raised his brow. “I should take this,” he remarked.

“Who is it?” Vilain moved a pace closer.

Gunnar held up the phone, tracking Vilain’s eyes as he moved again and looked down to the screen. Then he slammed forward without warning and smacked him concrete-hard in the face with his other hand, following up fast with another blow even as Vilain was already dropping gracelessly to the ground.

“Fucking idiot,” he gritted through his teeth before bringing the phone up to answer it. “Yeah?”

Barney’s voice was loud on the line: //Where the _fuck_ are you?//

“Don’t say anything you don’t want Church to hear,” Gunnar warned him. “Remember the place we went after a lightning storm came out of nowhere, last fall?”

There was a pause, then, //Yes.// 

“Meet me there.”

 

***


	9. Out there on a darkened road the lines are dead and the cars explode

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now Barney's on his way, and he's bringing the angst along with him. How considerate!

Gunnar checked his watch as soon as he hung up. It would take Barney a little while to get to the trucker bar, but it would only take him a few minutes on the bike. An apposite phrase came into his mind: it looked like he had time to kill… Gunnar glanced down at Vilain, still unconscious, blood and breath wheezing in his broken nose. Almost automatically, he bent over and tilted his chin up, opening his mouth to see if his throat was clear. “No, you’re not dying yet,” he murmured. _You’re fucking lucky that I can’t decide what the fuck I’m doing with you._

He could have followed through on his earlier words; put a bullet between Vilain’s closed eyes, but whatever was going on between them didn’t seem like finished business yet, and ending him like that – after Vilain had pushed _him_ out of the way of a bullet back by the riverside – felt like it wasn’t the way to do this.

Two minutes later, he’d taken Vilain’s phone, gun and knives, and tied his wrists at his back using his own ripped up shirt. Vilain’s body was heavy; muscles loose and pliant under his hands, and Gunnar couldn’t help feeling the irony of manipulating him into a position he wanted. This fucked-up situation must have been getting to Vilain as much as it was to him – it was really slipping to have let Gunnar get close enough to hit like that, and Vilain’s reaction had been barely there. 

Gunnar rolled his body to the side of the track, and as an afterthought he took off Vilain’s watch as well, tossing it far into the undergrowth; he wanted him feeling screwed, disorientated and wondering what the hell had happened when he woke up – it would certainly be fitting. Then, Gunnar looked up and down the deserted lane once more, and got back on the Harley. 

 

When he arrived at the truck stop it looked busy and he didn’t want to go inside, so he stood in the parking lot near the bike and wished he had some cigarettes on him. The last time he’d been here – the reason why he knew where this place was at all – he and Barney had been riding out this way when a storm had blown up out of nowhere, drenching the road and blackening the sky so fast that it felt like a fucking apocalypse raining down. It had taken every ounce of his concentration to keep the bike steady on the asphalt as the downpour drove into his face. They’d come off the road at the first shelter they came to, soaked through and exhilarated, and Barney had lit up an OpusX under the leaky canvas awning around the back of the bar. They smoked it together and watched the lightning forking through the sky and the rain coming down in sheets, and Gunnar remembered feeling so in awe of the power of that storm, yet so comfortable just being there in it with Barney… 

He looked at his watch again and swallowed the memory of the taste of that smoke and the rain on his lips, and hoped that Barney’s arrival was going to ground him in the same way now. Vilain had thrown him off kilter; the whole mission, right from where it had started to tank, had thrown him off where his mind should have been. Okay, he hadn’t been sharp enough or fast enough to stop Barney getting shot in that ambush, but the truth was that _no one_ could have: it was one of those terrible, gut-wrenching moments where the only thing you could do was watch helplessly as a comrade went down. Gunnar was all too aware that if you stayed in this game long enough, it was guaranteed to happen: your own version of that nightmare split-second, be it an IED detonating, an unseen sniper hitting, flying shrapnel shearing clean through a body, whatever… And he was one of the lucky ones; he’d only be haunted by the moment that he’d _nearly_ watched Barney die.

But Gunnar had come to a realisation during his time with Vilain – withdrawing from the other Expendables and closing Barney out through shame was like shooting _himself_ in the arm. No matter what had happened in the past, or what he thought the rest of the team might say about it, facing it _sine metu_ and trusting that their faith in him was strong enough was what he should have been doing. That was where his mind should have taken him.

 

The relief Gunnar felt in the pit of his stomach as Barney’s Mustang truck swung in to the parking lot told him all he needed to know about how right having his partner back with him was. By contrast though, whether Barney was going to feel the same way once it came to addressing the situation with Vilain was a vast and unsettling unknown quantity. Barney pulled up alongside the bike and got out quickly, and Gunnar tried to read the emotion behind his expression as he strode around to him. He looked guarded and _on_ guard, eyes reflexively marking the area around the building, but not before he’d flicked Gunnar himself up and down. _Checking I’m in one piece,_ Gunnar thought, and hoped that was a good sign. 

“Let’s get out of sight,” Barney said. “Around the side of this place.” Gunnar followed him without question

As soon as they were out of view of the highway, Barney turned around and practically pinned him against the grimy wall of the building, his good arm pressing across Gunnar’s chest with measured force. Gunnar let it happen, and although he could have pushed out of it or twisted away, he didn’t try; he knew it wasn’t that kind of situation. Barney didn’t look angry or ready for a fight; close up he looked frustrated, and underneath that, worried. It seemed like this was physical contact to get them together, not shove them apart.

“Why the hell did you go out and do… whatever the fuck it is you’re doing, alone?” Barney demanded. “That note you left for me? Jesus, Gunnar!”

“I’m sorry,” Gunnar answered.

“You’d better be, because since I saw it-- no, correction, since I had a call from _Church_ , went over to the apartment and _then_ saw it, I have been going out of my fucking mind wondering what you were doing, where you’d ended up, and if you were even still alive!”

“Church called you?”

“Oh yeah.” Barney nodded emphatically. “But before I talk about _that_ little conversation, I’m gonna finish railing you out some more, because you seem to need the reminder: you don’t go solo, Gunnar. There’s a reason we all work as a fuckin’ unit here – we make ourselves as hard to kill as we possibly can, and that means having back-up, having numbers on the ground...” Then he shook his head, expression disbelieving. “What are you _doing_ here?”

Gunnar shifted a little under Barney’s arm, the material of his shirt snagging on the rough brickwork of the wall behind him. The length of time that Barney was prepared to keep up this proximity while he waited for an answer was making it seem like he was trying to feel his response as well as hear it, and Gunnar was hyper-aware of his own heartbeat pulsing steadily under Barney’s forearm. His chest was rising and falling with every breath and moving Barney with it, and as Gunnar looked down he saw that he had put his rings on again. _Yeah, they probably_ did _need the luck._ “I thought I was doing the right thing,” Gunnar said. Then something occurred to him. “Did you _go to_ the address on the note?”

“Yeah, and I could see that a fucking firefight had happened there! So I thought that _that_ might’ve explained why you weren’t picking up the phone. Pretty reassuring, huh?”

 _Shit_. “I was on the bike – I didn’t hear. We were…” Gunnar stopped at how that word sounded out loud. _We_.

“Gunnar, I know who you were with,” Barney said, his voice suddenly sounding dangerously calm for how Gunnar would have expected him to be; for how he’d been only a moment before. “Church has been watching all of us, all along. He knew that Vilain was at the apartment, and since you were still alive when he left, Church was pretty confident that he was there angling for a team-up.”

 _Of course. Apparently_ everyone _was one step ahead with figuring out what was going on with this fucking mission!_

“I’m sure you can guess: he could hardly wait to ‘helpfully inform’ me that you were probably dealing-up with Vilain before I even knew jack shit about it...”

Gunnar wanted to say how _that_ was all so much bullshit. Except that it wasn’t.

“And think about how Church works, Gunnar. Straight on the line to make a counter offer – his own deal – which, incidentally, as far as he thinks now, I’ve taken.”

Gunnar swallowed. He shouldn’t have been surprised by how twisted and how back-stabbing this whole business had gotten, especially not after the last few days – and with Church presiding. But the reminder of how much he and Barney, and the other Expendables were just well-paid plastic soldiers being pushed around on the table-tops of Agency suits was more uncomfortable than the bricks he could feel digging into his spine.

“We’re back on _his_ side? I thought this couldn’t get any more fucked up!” 

“You think I’m ecstatic about it? But I’m bein’ pragmatic here; this is ‘lesser of two evils’ 101, Gunnar,” Barney replied. “According to Church, Vilain’s weapons were all he ever wanted. He had to let that come out to have any hope of convincing me that he wasn’t just going to keep merrily killing us off like _that_ was his intention all along.”

“And we’re buying it?” Gunnar let his expression do the talking as to what he thought of that. He felt Barney’s fingers flex a little on the side of his chest before he replied, rucking up the cotton of his shirt; it wasn’t exactly close to grabbing a fistful of fabric, but it was enough to show Gunnar where his patience was heading… 

“Whether we want to believe it or not, what he’s saying is that he sent us in there expecting us to kill Vilain when we came across him.”

“So why didn’t he fucking just ask us to do that in the first place, if he knew Vilain was going to be there all along?” Gunnar demanded.

“For Christ’s sake, Gunnar – is it really worth it to be going through all of this now?” They’d both raised their voices in the last moments of this exchange, and Barney seemed to suddenly realise it and check himself, looking around to see if they’d drawn any attention from people passing through the parking lot. “We’re fuckin’ making it look like we’re gonna square up to each other,” he muttered, stepping back. 

Even though it had been an odd kind of intimacy, Gunnar immediately felt the loss of the weight and warmth of Barney’s arm across his chest. He could have laughed at that if it wouldn’t have made him seem absolutely fucking insane… Somehow now he couldn’t keep Barney close enough, despite having been shrinking from his touch at every opportunity since the warehouse until here! 

“Use your own brain,” Barney added, but then carried on himself anyway, slower and quieter this time. _Tired of this shit_ , Gunnar thought. “Church is Mr Business right through. How much money did we exchange to do an easy recon at a ‘deserted’ factory? And how much would it have been if it was a contract on Vilain and his men instead? If we end up walking in and ‘unexpectedly’ taking them out, he can just shrug and thank us for the extra effort. What are we gonna say? Fucking job’s done with.”

It figured, but that wasn’t any consolation for all the bullshit it had brought. 

“When Vilain came running scared to you, Church had to show his hand to me in case we _all_ came back at him. Yeah, he was pissed that I gave all that money to Sandra to rebuild Vilena, but not pissed enough to want us off the table for Agency work for good. I think we were wrong about that… Church is slimy, and I don’t trust him to tell the truth, but I do trust him to keep his own best interests in the forefront of his mind.”

Again, it was just all too plausible. “So Church isn’t on us now?”

“Not at the moment, at least. It’s Vilain in the firing line.”

Gunnar nearly had to laugh at that, too. “Then whoever Church’s other operatives are, they’ve got a really fucking bad aim, Barney.”

“Or they assumed you’d joined up with him.” Barney paused for a beat too long before saying, “They’d be forgiven for thinking _that_ , right?”

“Barney…” Gunnar started, but a warning in Barney’s eyes trailed him off. It looked like he was gearing up for the question they’d both been ducking. 

“Gunnar, I’ve still gotta ask you this, and you’d better give me a straight answer, straight off: why did Vilain come to you? Why is his ‘in’ to us _you_?” Gunnar could hear Barney’s voice nearly crack on that final word, despite his apparent efforts to keep his tone calm, and it made his heart kick with regret for the whole situation.

 _Okay._ He paused for a second to give his mind a chance to catch up with the realisation that what he said next was probably going to end their relationship, but it didn’t seem to do anything to crystallise his thoughts. He wasn’t sure that either of them were actually prepared for this, just that it was going to have to come out, regardless of his hopes or fears for Barney’s reaction. When Gunnar finally spoke, everything ended up sounding fast and strange: “At the warehouse Vilain was dropping hints that he knew me from before. He meant a time in Europe, five years ago. I didn’t remember him at all, because… of how I was five years ago. It came back to me later – a bit. It was such a stupid thing; it wasn’t anything to do with business. He was just a guy in a club I went to when I was high, and we slept together, I think…”

Barney swallowed hard. “You _think_?”

“It sounds crazy, I know it sounds pathetic, but… part of my life is one long series of blackouts and half-memories, Barney. I wish I knew better and I wish it wasn’t, but I can’t change it. I can’t fucking change it now.” Then Gunnar closed his eyes, not wanting to see any more of Barney’s reaction; how betrayed he must be. “I’m sorry,” he repeated quietly. 

Barney made a noise in his throat, somewhere between exhaling and speaking, and Gunnar let the back of his head hit the wall; he was close to letting himself sink down it to sit on the hard ground, his body heavy with exhaustion and the adrenaline crash from earlier on. He wondered if that showed, because he heard Barney take a pace forward again, felt him getting nearer. At least he wasn’t walking away. 

“What happened when he came to the apartment?” Barney asked carefully. “What happened when you met up? Was part of that gunfight between you? Or… what happened?” His voice cracked again, and Gunnar’s heart sank again.

“At the apartment, I didn’t even know he was there until after he’d gone. He left a note to set up the meet. When I got _there_ it was a bust – someone shot at both of us.”

“Church’s guys.”

“The only way we could get out of there was fighting together. As soon as we were clear, I cursed him out and left him unconscious on the ground. And then you came here.” Gunnar finally opened his eyes again and met Barney’s staring right at him.

“Unconscious dying?”

“I don’t think so,” Gunnar answered. “I couldn’t take the final shot. I don’t know why. Every time I think I’ve got this worked out in my head, something else happens and I’m… fucking _spinning_ again.” He was saying this all so frankly that it felt almost like he was listening to someone else’s voice speaking, rather than the sound coming from inside him. It was eerie, and he nearly shuddered with it, but pressing up against the wall was keeping his frame a lot steadier than his heart rate had gotten. Once more, he thought about slipping down to the ground. If Barney _was_ going to leave him, sitting on his ass in the weeds and dirt around the side of a bar was probably a pretty appropriate place… He went for it, letting his long legs fold and the bricks scrape his shirt up as he slid, and he was surprised when Barney dropped down with him, a hand out to his elbow immediately.

“Gunnar, come on.” Barney’s tone was half-exasperated, half-gentle, and Gunnar suddenly realised that he must be looking more fucked-up than he’d thought, if his partner was bringing that one out on him. _Partner…_ If he still was. 

“So you’ve been putting yourself through fucking mental torture ever since the warehouse… Okay, I get that. But I just _don’t_ understand why you didn’t say shit about it to me. What’s the fuckin’ point of us – of being ‘us’ – if the one thing I thought we had that made any kind of difference isn’t there? The honesty that’s supposed to make the difference between ‘us’, and ‘me, or you, and everybody else’?”

 _Honesty._ Of all the words that could stand in for love, that was Barney’s, then. “Fucking scared you’d kick me to the kerb the second you thought I had anything to do with Vilain,” Gunnar admitted. 

“You were trying to _protect_ our relationship?” Barney’s grip on his elbow tightened. 

“Ass-backwards, I know. I guess that’s me.”

“Not always,” Barney muttered under his breath. “Where did you leave this bastard? It’s near here, right?”

“Vilain.”

“Yeah.” 

_Vilain_. 

And suddenly the thought of going back to where he was – of seeing Barney and him in the same space – was cripplingly and nauseatingly overwhelming. It set off another wave of regret that flooded Gunnar through like a cold water intravenous and made his limbs feel dull and heavy. “Barney, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry,” he heard himself repeating. “I don’t know what I’m…”

“Don’t,” Barney was telling him through clenched teeth. “Don’t do this now. You have to get up, and we have to finish this.” The hand on his elbow was urging him up, but Gunnar felt like his body was weighted to the dirt, like the ground wanted to pull him down and inter him where his corpse belonged.

“I…”

“Not _now_ ,” Barney cut him off emphatically. “Gunnar, don’t fucking break down on me before this is over. Get up.”

 _Just leave me._ “I slept with Vilain.”

“Years before we were together. And then you tried to kill him in that basement, refused to team up with him, and left him bleeding somewhere out here. Think about this! Because I’m not seeing the threat to me in what's happened.”

“I thought you’d… I wasn’t sure you’d believe me.”

Barney shook his head exasperatedly. “Fucking-- When you tell me something, I believe it, Gunnar. Can you get that through that messed-up head of yours? You trust what I say, right?”

“Yes,” Gunnar said, mind clearing for that one: of course he fucking did.

“Yeah, because that’s how this is – that’s _how_ our thing works.”

“Vilain though…” Gunnar tried again. “I didn’t tell you anything about it; I just went off on my own.”

“Jesus Christ, Gunnar. Snap out of this!”

Gunnar was completely at sea now, leaning back against the concrete while Barney looked at him like he almost _pitied_ him, fingers squeezing on his arm hard enough to keep his mind on them. 

“You came out of the wrong side of an interrogation with a guy whose whole sorry rep is based on mind games and manipulation, and you’re wondering why I’m not taking the bullshit thinking he’s left behind seriously, and instead I’m paying attention to the things you’ve done that _weren’t_ part of the programme? You’ve got to push it out of your head, Gunnar. Go wherever you went when you cursed and knocked him out. Then fucking open your eyes and see _me_ here, ‘cause I’m not going anywhere.” 

 

***


	10. Still I see hear speak do talk see

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We're into the endgame now, as Barney and Gunnar return to chase down Vilain.
> 
> Content note: this part contains swearing and descriptions of injuries and firearms violence. As this is a loose AU of Ex2, it also contains major character death in line with the canon. If you haven't watched the film, I suppose that's a spoiler, but really... who's going into an action movie expecting the bad guys to be around for the end credits? ;o) 
> 
> There's an epilogue to come after this.

“This is the turn.”

“Okay.” Barney took it, rolling the Mustang off the smooth asphalt and onto the hard earth of the track. The sky was more clouded than earlier, and the moon provided only sporadic illumination of the landscape around them, occasionally catching and reflecting off particular surfaces and objects. It was strange, and they’d both lowered their voices in deference to the near-darkness. “Where did you leave him?”

“Up here on the left.” Gunnar scanned the edge of the lane. In the light cast by Barney’s headlamps he could easily pick out the ridges and depressions in the undergrowth that showed where he’d walked and rolled Vilain over it earlier. “This area.”

Barney slowed and pulled up before where Gunnar was indicating, cutting the engine but leaving the lights. “You sure?”

“Yeah.” So Vilain was gone. He’d expected it, and a small part of him actually felt relief at that. Sure, if they couldn’t find him, they were just deferring what they both knew this had turned into now: an endgame, but a little time to pull his thoughts back together before facing Vilain again was more welcome than Gunnar would have cared to admit.

They both got out to take a look anyway, walking the few yards forward to the flattened ground together. The ripped shirt-material he’d used to secure Vilain’s wrists was lying in the grass, slit through, and Gunnar wondered where _that_ blade had been. He’d checked him while he was unconscious, yes, but not with a fine-toothed comb. There was blood on the ground, too – evidence of Vilain’s face bleeding freely before he’d come around. Gunnar saw Barney note both of these things without speaking, his expression inscrutable, and he wondered what judgement his partner was passing behind that mask. Then Barney switched to scanning the ground leading away from the spot down the track, walking a little further on before stopping to squint up at the shrouded moon.

“It's too fuckin’ dark for this,” Barney murmured. “The guy’s fast, right? I can make some pretty good guesses about where he might be moving, but we’re more likely to draw attention to _ourselves_ before we come up on him." He shook his head. “You need a black widow out here for us to do this properly.”

That would’ve made things simple; between Barney’s skill at tracking and his with a night-scoped rifle, Gunnar knew their chances of taking Vilain down if he was still near would have been pretty strong. But since they didn’t have the rifle, let alone night-sights, Vilain would have to make himself really fucking obvious for them to close in on him. And Gunnar had a feeling he wasn’t going to do that; he’d left Vilain in a mess, but not bad enough that he couldn’t have got himself up and away from the area in the bare half-hour since he’d left him.

Vilain was resourceful, and the land couldn’t have been completely uninhabited. If he hadn’t found a vehicle – or used his injuries to get a good Samaritan to stop on the road for him – by now, Gunnar would have been surprised. No watch, no phone… to all intents and purposes Gunnar had provided him with the perfect mugging victim set-up. Woe betide anyone who had fallen for it; he didn’t see Vilain allowing any loose ends or the possibility of calls to the cops while he suspected Church was hunting for him.

Barney had returned to looking down the lane, hands on hips and facing into the blank darkness beyond the headlights’ reach, apparently deliberating what to do next. Gunnar was about to say what he’d just been thinking, and suggest that they were on a hiding to nothing by going further away from the highway in the dark, when Barney suddenly cast a glance back at him.

“You think he’s long gone, don’t you?”

Gunnar nodded, but Barney was already staring out into the shadows once more, so he added an “Uh huh.” For whatever _his_ predictions were worth. Every time so far he’d assumed he knew where Vilain was, the bastard had always turned out to be-- Gunnar froze as he caught up with his own thought process. In the apartment, at the riverside… _right behind me. Fuck_. He made a near silent hiss at the realisation, and Barney glanced over again, long enough for Gunnar to catch his eye – long enough for him to read the warning in his expression.

They’d shared enough silent conversations that Gunnar knew Barney’s casual move back towards him was less about the affectionate proximity he was about to act out than about disguising the opportunity to find out what he was thinking.

“Okay, you're probably right,” Barney began as he reached Gunnar, holding a hand out as he spoke. “But let me check the map on your phone before we go – for all we know, there's somewhere really fuckin' obvious near-by.”

Gunnar took out the handset to pass to him, using their closeness to speak fast under his breath. “Are there guns in the truck? ‘Cause if there are, then Vilain’s gonna be armed and aiming at us.”

“No, I’m wearin’ mine,” Barney replied quickly.

“Then switch it for that,” Gunnar gestured at the phone, “and we go in 3, 2…”

They turned as one, bringing their guns up to aim through the headlights towards the truck and moving swiftly to get out of the beams’ dazzle and to either side of the Mustang, bearing down on the vehicle and checking all around it with silent efficiency.

A split-second glint in his peripheral vision was all it took for Gunnar to make the knife in Vilain’s grip and pinpoint his position at the rear of the truck, body crouched between the cast of the taillights. “Drop it!” he commanded, “Or I pull this now. We don’t _have_ to talk.”

Vilain gave a short laugh as he lowered the blade to the ground by his feet with Gunnar watching it all the way, followed by the movement of his hand back up. “You’re getting quicker at this, Jensen,” he called out. “Perhaps we know each other a little _too_ intimately to be on opposite sides…”

“Get up. Move away from the truck.” Gunnar wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of reacting to that line, so obviously there for Barney’s benefit.

Vilain’s voice had sounded nasal and strange, and as he stepped out into the red glow behind the tailgate, Gunnar could see the swelling from the damage to his face. The unnatural curve Gunnar’s punch had made of his nose, and the blood that coated the skin below it, stood out even in the dim light. The bloodstain was smeared to the side of Vilain’s mouth and across the back of his fingers where he’d wiped it away, and his tight lips gave away the degree of pain he had to be feeling now. _Good_. It made it harder for Gunnar to see him as the same person from his dream, from that club – harder to recognise it as the same face he’d caught in his hands and guided into a kiss, those same cheeks he’d watched hollowing around his cock… _You motherfucker,_ he thought darkly. Harder to see it, but no easier to think about.

As Vilain backed-up away from the Mustang, Gunnar moved in front of him, keeping his gun trained on Vilain’s chest and setting his jaw like stone. He wasn’t sure what to say next. Vilain was doing everything he asked him to, and Gunnar realised that the first command he’d given had come with the suggestion that they could have words to exchange if he did that. He didn’t consciously know why he’d led this off that way, but it meant that one or other of them was going to have to follow up on it. What did he actually have to say to Vilain? Was Vilain just going to try to make a deal with them again? He was shit out of luck if he thought he was going to be successful.

It was Vilain who filled the silence. “I am presuming that you're getting back down on your knees at the altar, then?” he said. “Business. It’s exactly what I said to you. The way we all work… Who gains?”

“Save your philosophy,” Gunnar growled.

“Church is hardly a better call than I am, Jensen – I took _money_ to have my men shoot at your lover, but who was it who actually wanted him dead?”

Gunnar felt his lip twitch with an unspoken curse. Not just at hearing Vilain dare to bring Barney and their relationship into this, but also at the unpalatable truth of what he was saying. Barney might have considered Church’s weapon-greed story plausible, but Gunnar was far from convinced that he hadn’t been hoping for _both_ sets of mercs to go down in the crossfire.

“What are you going to do next time Church decides the Expendables are just a little too much drama to have around? You could barely save him this time.” Vilain nodded in the direction of the other side of the truck, apparently perfectly aware of where Barney was standing in the shadows.

“Shut the fuck up!” Gunnar hated that he could only come out with that as a response, and the way Vilain immediately ignored it didn’t do anything to help.

“In fact, _you_ couldn’t save him at all. Where were you in that basement? Flat on your back with me.”

And Gunnar couldn’t change the reality that he was _right_.

Back in the warehouse, he hadn’t stopped any of it... _Christmas_ had rescued Barney, and it was Tool at the hospital. Gunnar was nowhere; he’d been tied up with Vilain, and then with Vilain in the apartment. Vilain had been in their bedroom, and in their bed in Gunnar’s dreams; inside his skin just like in Paris, and then they were together by the river, and riding down the same highway as in that storm. Earlier here they'd been alone on the track, and then barely apart for half an hour before they were back together again now! All this time. At every turn. It was Vilain he was with. It was Vilain who was in his life everywhere, fading Barney out into the darkness.

Church was a dangerous bedfellow, but it was all figurative; with Vilain, he’d really gone there, and now he couldn’t get away from any of it. _Jesus_ , he was fucking up over this man! He should never have done any of this without all the Expendables behind him, without Barney beside him, because it was clear that he just couldn’t think straight about it himself. And Vilain was bringing out something in him that he didn’t trust, something precarious: Vilain had got to him. Whatever they’d done back in Paris, it had kicked off some fucking ridiculous, unconscious, animal bullshit that was muddying his mind and making a connection between them that his body still felt. His instincts struggled to work against it, veering to extremes. Gunnar could feel it and he hated it!

His face must have twisted into an expression that betrayed his turmoil, because Vilain let out another laugh. “Oh, _come on,_ Gunnar,” he practically shouted. “Never has one man hesitated so pathetically in the face of his own desire… Do you want to kill me for the truth I speak?” He waited for a reply, but while Gunnar’s mind had the answer: yes, Vilain had to be gone; he wanted to finish this now – his voice was somehow dead in his throat.

“My god, I think I’ve really created something special here,” Vilain picked up the thread again. “I know you want to, yet you _can’t_! Perhaps you’ll want to kill me for the lies I speak, then? Because I can tell you, if you do that, I really will be going out over some of my finest work.”

Gunnar didn’t even understand what Vilain was saying, now.

“All the shit that Church gave me before the warehouse job? Half-complete personnel files, surveillance, ‘biographic leverage’… There were dates all over it – trips to different countries and rough details of what you did there. I saw you were in Paris, and there were little spy-game notes against your name with question marks and suggestions all left lying for the future; I didn’t have to read between the lines to see what they were there for. So I took them.”

 _What did…?_ Gunnar stared at Vilain, at the blood cracking on his skin, the red light reflecting back off his body.

“You gave me the opportunity in that interrogation, and I used it. You think you’re clever, Gunnar Jensen? That you made the measure of me here on this road before? Well, take a long hard look at what you believe. I wasn’t even _in_ Paris five years ago.”

Gunnar’s hands were suddenly trembling. _No!_ He _had_ those memories; those senses - however much he hadn't wanted them to be true, they were there in his head!

“What did your imagination come up with? With a mind like yours, I'm sure it was a _beautiful_ fantasy.”

“You… You fucking…” Gunnar stuttered. He wanted to raise the gun higher and pull the trigger but it inexplicably felt like it was falling through his fingers, disappearing in his grip. “I…” He stumbled on the words again. Whatever he was trying to get out, it wasn’t coming; the sentence was sticking and skipping and it finished with the numbing realisation, _I can’t do it._ How could he have fallen for this? He _couldn't_ have.

And Vilain was laughing hard now. Stepping forward.

_He'd gone over and over it..._

Reaching to take the pistol from Gunnar's hand.

_No._

 

He felt Barney dart across him before he heard the sound. So fast. So--

Barney’s voice. “You piece of shit.” Followed by a gunshot, the barrel straight on Vilain's forehead. It echoed through the darkness with a piercing crack as Gunnar stood frozen, struggling to catch up with what was happening.

Then Vilain’s body was falling to the floor and Barney was turning to look at him, moving swiftly to get hold of him. “Gunnar?”

Hearing his name half snapped him out of it.

“Gunnar, look at me.” Barney grasped his shoulders and pulled him the rest of the way. “Vilain’s dead; that bastard's gone. D'you hear me?”

“Oh fuck... Barney.”

“His shit is over. He's dead and I'm here.” 

Gunnar took a deep breath; his mind was still reeling, but he understood what Barney meant.

“Okay?”

 _Yeah_. He focussed on Barney and nodded; seeing the raw concern in his eyes, feeling the warm strength of his grip: this was the reality.

 

***


	11. Epilogue - But in here, there's nothing but the good things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Basically, this epilogue (taking place some months after the last events) is the gratuitous sex scene between Barney and Gunnar that I couldn't really justify in the main body of the fic because everyone was horribly injured all the time! There's banter, edging, and the themes of agency and power still run through it, but it _is_ essentially a chapter of PWP to finish up with, so skipping it won't hurt if the porn's not really your thing.

“You ever think of repainting the ceiling in here?” Barney asked.

“Huh?” Gunnar said, looking up at the rough artex plastered over the bed. “Is that a really bad come-on line, or do you _mean_ ‘repaint the ceiling’? I think it looks okay…”

Barney shrugged against the pillows. “The nicotine shows up in this light; I just noticed it.”

“Says the man who lives in a shed.”

“I live in--”

“--a shed with a plane in it, and you’re telling me to paint my ceiling. I don’t know about the legitimacy of that.”

Barney laughed. “Okay, far be it for me to throw stones from my glass house – I get it.” He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on his elbow, back to near full-strength in that arm in the time since the mission had ended. Gunnar was glad to see it; while he’d come to terms with not having been able to prevent his lover getting shot, the reminder of it in Barney’s careful movements and favouring his other side was something he wouldn’t miss. Although he wasn’t sure why Barney had moved to watch him so intently. 

“What?” Gunnar asked. “Why are you staring at me?”

“Because I _was_ lookin’ up, but the ceiling looks like shit, so…”

Now it was Gunnar’s turn to laugh. “You are fuckin’ pushing this. If you didn’t happen to be implying that _I_ look okay by saying that, I would be seriously thinking about whether I’m prepared to share my subpar-ceilinged bedroom with you tonight.”

“Yeah? Well, I think you’re gonna want me to stick around.”

“And why’s that?” Gunnar rolled side-on himself, so that they were lying face to face. Then he raised an eyebrow expectantly.

“Because,” Barney told him, “I just decided that ‘painting the ceiling’ _is_ a euphemism after all, and if you can hack it, I’m going to make you do it.”

Gunnar’s brow rose even further at that. “That’s fighting talk.”

“Something beginning with ‘f’,” Barney joked.

“Something beginning with this…” And Gunnar leant in to kiss him, open-mouthed and firm.

Barney kissed him right back, immediately reaching to pull their bodies together, and within a few moments Gunnar could feel his own arousal being mirrored as Barney’s hardening cock brushed up against him. 

The scars and sun-damage wrought on the parts of their skin that were routinely exposed made a compelling contrast with the areas that were more protected, and Gunnar liked sliding his hands down Barney’s body to feel the rough surface of his chest and abs give way to the softer spots lower on his belly, ending up in the short hair leading to the base of his cock. He did that now, ghosting his fingers around Barney’s groin as they kissed, and felt Barney shift and press closer in an effort to capture a firmer touch.

Gunnar had a pretty good idea where Barney intended this to go in terms of teasing and edging him towards his orgasm, and he wasn’t going to miss the chance to get _him_ hot and wanting too. Taking hold of Barney’s cock and working it against his palm earned him a low murmur of pleasure into their kiss, and fingers clasping at the back of his neck; before long they were stroking out over his shoulder, getting ready to urge him down the bed

When Barney was fully hard and the subtle push on Gunnar's shoulder was suddenly coupled with him drawing back and not so subtly asking, “You wanna blow me for a minute?” Gunnar had to smile; for someone who was into body language and watching for physical cues during sex, Barney didn’t mince his own words. As it happened, Gunnar _did_ want to do that, and he was quick to slide himself down and take a taste of the cock he was inevitably going to be cursing out later on.

Barney groaned appreciatively as Gunnar took him in his mouth, tongue running flat and firm over the shaft, before swirling and rolling around the head. Barney was big, but Gunnar wasn’t just a figurative big-mouth, and he knew he could reduce him to messy gasps and thrusts within minutes if he wanted to. This was something more leisurely, though; they were here for the long haul, and Gunnar could take his time to tease and concentrate on feeling every little ridge and hitch under his tongue. For a little while, he lost himself in what he was doing, happy to let Barney call it.

When he did, Gunnar moved back up the bed to settle down for the next phase of this ‘interior decoration’, lying on his back and letting Barney take up whatever position he wanted over his body. He was already anticipating the pleasure he was going to be riding at this man’s mercy, and feeling his skin prickle and heat at Barney’s touch, and he wondered how long Barney was going to keep them at the stage of playing around and teasing each other before switching to focus on how far he could push _him_.

Barney was apparently happy to start by flattening him, rolling on top of Gunnar’s body and caging over him with his arms. The heaviness balanced on and above him reminded Gunnar how strong and powerful Barney was, a lifetime of working out and fighting having laid down muscle and poise that was hard not to be impressed by. Another prickle broke out across Gunnar’s skin just looking, and again as he took in the familiar scent of oil, cigar smoke and expensive cologne that was the give-away for Barney’s love of classic indulgences and things with old-fashioned engines. Gunnar wondered which category he fitted into…

Barney was watching him intently again.

“That’s nice,” Gunnar supplied. “Your weight on me.” 

“Want more?”

Gunnar nodded and Barney obliged, pressing his hips against Gunnar’s and trapping their cocks between them. Then he started to move in a rough rhythm, the friction sending delicious pulses of pleasure to somewhere deep in Gunnar’s gut.

 _Okay,_ here they went…

“Put your hands on my chest. Keep me down,” Gunnar challenged, moving to arch up before Barney had a chance to shift from balancing his palms to either side of him. “Too slow,” he laughed.

“Oh yeah?” Barney growled, getting his hands up to Gunnar’s pecs and splaying his fingers, bearing down so that Gunnar was forced to hold them both up or fall back onto the pillow again.

“Yeah.” Gunnar smiled. He was strong enough to maintain the balance for a moment, so he did, enjoying how their position changed the angle of their hips and rolled them even tighter together. Then Barney leaned further forward to kiss him, and the press of his lips and tongue made a good distraction from supporting them up off the bed. Gunnar let himself sink back, bringing his own arms around Barney’s shoulders and feeling the firm muscles in his embrace, the pleasing heat of his skin.

Barney drew back from the kiss and turned his head a little to whisper in Gunnar’s ear. “Now I’ve got you.”

“Not yet,” he answered, tone still teasing.

“You want it?” Barney’s voice was low.

“Yeah, take it.”

Barney eased up on rocking his hips and leaned over quickly to the bedside to grab the half-crushed tube of lube lying on the cabinet. Then he sat back on his knees and slicked a generous squeeze over his fingers and hard-on. Gunnar shifted impatiently, drawing his own knees up so that Barney could get close in between his thighs.

“Ready?”

Gunnar nodded, and Barney pressed two fingers up against him straight away, spreading and slicking the lube over his asshole before working them inside and slowly finger fucking him. He stretched him out until Gunnar was eyes-closed and pliant underneath him, one hand rested loosely over his cock.

“Lookin’ good,” Barney remarked. “Fucking hot.”

“Fuck yeah,” Gunnar breathed. “Keep rubbin’ right there… Get your dick inside.”

“Do which?”

“What?” Gunnar opened his eyes again, hand ghosting over his cock with a little more purpose now.

Barney grinned. “Keep rubbin’ right there or get my dick inside?”

Gunnar raised an eyebrow. “How about you get your dick inside and rub right there?”

Barney drew his fingers out and got himself lined up, pushing Gunnar’s hand out of the way to take hold of his cock at the same time. It freed up Gunnar to skim his fingers over the heated skin of his torso and pinch at his own nipples, eliciting a murmur of pleasure from deep inside his throat. “Mmm, come on…”

Barney was teasing him with the tip of his cock, pressing up against his asshole and sliding shallowly inside before pulling out again, stroking Gunnar’s hard-on alongside the movement until he was twisting and trying to push back on him, hungry for more inside him.

“Fucking cocktease. Are you gonna go deeper or not?”

In answer, Barney squeezed and tugged Gunnar’s cock again, angling the head of his dick to drag firmly over his prostate as he pulled back.

“Uhh!” Gunnar’s fingers splayed involuntarily, and Barney repeated the movement, the jerk of pleasure it created becoming the starting point of him working exactly the right rhythm to take Gunnar apart.

“Still want me to go deep?”

“Yeah…”

He stroked shallowly again and Gunnar bucked hard against him.

“Hhhh, no – keep doing that! _Shit._ ”

Stroke.

His legs were crooked up awkwardly, but he couldn't feel any ache except the one blooming in his groin. 

Stroke.

“Yeah?” 

Barney played the pad of his thumb over the head of Gunnar’s cock, circling in the fresh pre-come and eliciting another involuntary shudder from him. It came hard on the heels of another stroke and pull-back, and Gunnar twisted a handful of bunched-up bedsheets in his fist. “You want me to beg.”

It wasn’t a question, and Barney didn’t give an answer; he just repeated his shallow dip and firm dick-jerk move, making Gunnar practically squirm to get him to fuck deeper or go faster.

“Barney…” Gunnar was torn between how good everything felt like this and the urge to feel it harder, _fuller_. His voice on Barney's name wavered as much as his resolve, before another slide sent him gasping and arching his back off the bed.

“Yeah?” Barney smiled in response, and Gunnar wondered how he could seem so together when this must have been testing _him_ as well. He’d started to stroke Gunnar’s cock slowly and continuously now, and that was going to get really hard to control, really quickly.

Gunnar growled. Barney knew his body inside out; knew precisely what he needed to do to step up the pressure. They were both flushed, and Gunnar’s hand was flexing steadily in the sheets, unconsciously keeping the rhythm of Barney’s hand on his dick. “Nngh… _Jesus fuck._ ” His cock was slick with pre-come and sweat, letting Barney’s fingers run easily all the way up and down, and when he unexpectedly dipped them to press gently on his balls Gunnar very nearly cried out at the surge of heat it sparked.

“Easy,” Barney murmured. “You know I’m not going to let this happen until…”

Stroke.

“…until I hear you say it.”

Between the cock slipping over his prostate and the fingers back working his dick, Gunnar wasn’t convinced he was going to have words at his disposal at all very soon, and he shut his eyes and rode out the heatwave from the next thrust before he even tried. He felt Barney squeeze the base of his dick this time instead of stroking him, and he knew that he was reacting to stall him now. Paradoxically, that knowledge almost strengthened the urges his body was laying thick upon him; he knew how good Barney was at this game – how long he could keep reading him and pushing him and holding him until he was so desperate to come that his mind blanked on everything else. Another stroke, another wave, and Gunnar’s hips skittered wildly against the firm squeeze that immediately followed.

“Open your eyes,” Barney told him, and he did it, focussing in on his lover’s gaze and swallowing back a moan as Barney pushed his cock a fraction deeper inside him, hinting at the feeling of overwhelming fullness he could have if he wanted. And, fuck, he _really_ wanted it now.

“Fuck… Oh fuck, Barney.”

“Yeah?”

Stroke.

Heat flared hard in Gunnar’s groin. “I’m gonna…”

“No.” Barney stilled completely, a firm hand keeping Gunnar’s hips pinned against the bed as well. 

Gunnar caught his breath and chased reality through his mind until he felt like he could think again. “Okay, okay…”

“Yeah?” It was Barney’s mantra – the repeated question that reminded Gunnar that he was listening and tuned into the same moment and _inviting_ him to ask for what he craved. Barney moved minutely inside him again, another deliberate slip deeper, and it was enough to have Gunnar rushing out the plea he was waiting for.

“Fuck me, Barney. Fuck me and… _please_.”

“Jesus, Gunnar, yes!”

When Barney started stroking into him once more, he left Gunnar’s cock alone and just kept filling him completely with long firm thrusts – the exquisite finish they’d both been holding out for – and he knew exactly how to do it. Gunnar was moaning freely now, letting the waves of pleasure build back up with every stroke, his cock feeling twice as hard.

Barney’s breathing was ragged and the sweat on his brow and chest was the evidence of how much he’d been working to hold himself back, to keep the game going until Gunnar was ready.

“Oh shit,” Gunnar gasped out as he tightened his abdomen against the shakes and the tension radiated throughout his body. They were both so close… Gunnar gripped the bunched bedsheets as the waves coalesced into one continuous buzz of pleasure that was pushing everything else out of his mind, taking over his whole being. And then it broke, his orgasm coursing through him in a white hot surge that sprayed come up his chest in a perfect arc.

Barney’s hips thrust hard and erratic as the force of Gunnar’s release pulled him over the edge as well, and he spilled inside Gunnar with a heartfelt groan.

 

For a moment time seemed to slow down around them, eyes closed and getting their breath back before either of them could speak again. Then Gunnar felt Barney pull out and lie down heavily beside him, one hand coming up to rest possessively over his heart; the unconscious aptness of the gesture wasn’t lost on him, and they remained like that, skin to skin and satisfied, for a long while afterwards.

 

Gunnar was nearly asleep when Barney shifted a little, reaching over to turn the lamp off on the bedside, and he reflexively moved to accommodate the change in position. “Had to turn it off to avoid the terrible sight of the ceiling, right?” he murmured, and felt Barney laugh straight away.

“You didn’t reach; what can I say?”

“Who was in charge of that?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Barney stretched down and pulled the covers over them both, settling back with his body pressed close to Gunnar's. “Go to sleep.” 

 

 _-fin_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the randomly curious, all the chapter titles are lines from the Sisters of Mercy song [Good Things](http://www.lyricstime.com/the-sisters-of-mercy-good-things-lyrics.html), which is the song I associate with this pairing, and which also gave the title to the fic. It's a cool song - why not give it a [listen](http://youtu.be/t5wVcekUarw)?
> 
> Thank you for reading :o)


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